When looking for a way to bring AI and Wall Street together, Mike Taro WehmeyerThe CEO of AI financial services firm Taktile decided to go literal. Earlier this week, Tactile unveiled a 300-pound statue of a lobster — a symbol now associated with AI because of OpenClaw the agents popularized in Moltbook– opposite Wall Street The famous Charging Bull for a symbolic confrontation.
The stunt quickly went viral. Peter Steinbergerfounder of OpenClaw, it sounded insideas he did Kate Rouch, OpenAIchief marketing officer. After the lobster was pulled after hours in Manhattan’s Financial District, Wehmeyer discovered Taktile as the mastermind. The event coincided with the company’s launch of Taktile Labs, a new research unit focused on developing AI standards and frameworks for financial institutions.
“Our mission at Tactile is really to bring AI safely to banks,” Wehymer told the Observer. “Now, brokers can come to Wall Street and work with the bull, not against the bull.”
Tactile, with offices in New York, Berlin and London, was founded by Wehmeyer and his Harvard classmate. Maximilian Eber. The pair later worked together as machine learning engineers at QuantCo, building enterprise AI products. They quickly realized that the highly regulated financial sector presented unique barriers to deploying such tools—a problem they set out to solve with Tactile.
Founded in 2020, Taktile offers an AI platform built for use cases such as onboarding, credit, fraud detection and compliance. It counts more than 200 financial institutions as clients, including digital bank Monzo and insurer Allianz. Backed by Y Combinator, the startup has raised $79 million from Balderton Capital, Index Ventures and Tiger Global.
Towards the end of 2025, Wehmeyer noticed something new: patterns from GoogleOpenAI and Anthropogenic were performing complex tasks faster and better than humans. It was then, he said, that “2026 will be the year where AI really comes to financial services.” But for widespread adoption to occur, banks need a reliable source to interpret the rapid evolution of AI
This insight inspired the lobster statue – a marketing hook for Taktile Labs. The new institute aims to make AI agents more reliable and explainable through research and benchmarking. While existing standards test AI performance in fields such as mathematics or medicine, Wehmeyer noted that financial services still lack verified metrics for tasks such as loan underwriting and transaction monitoring.
To make it visible, Tactile commissioned New York-based artist Andrew Logan to create the nine-foot-tall sculpture in just ten days. Composed of a mix of metal and fiberglass, the piece was finished in a bronze hue to mirror Arturo Di Modica’s Charging Bull, a fixture of the Financial District since 1989.
“With Tactile Labs, we want to focus on one question, which is: What do financial institutions need to confidently deploy AI in high-stakes decisions?” Wehmeyer said. The initiative’s findings will be public and guided by a research council that includes Ben Liebaldvice president of engineering at Harvey; Fagner Abreua credit risk executive at Bradesco; AND Jonas Nell, cursor‘s engineering guidance on asynchronous agents.
The financial services industry, which spent $58 billion on AI in 2025, is expected to increase that spending to $97 billion by 2027according to Statista. However, adoption still lags behind the technical advancement of AI. Tactile joins a crowded field of competitors, including Provenir, Sperta and Scienaptic, all racing to close this gap.
After watching other industries transformed through AI, Wehmeyer believes finance is next – and he aims to lead that change. “Then, one day, we’ll be back on Wall Street. Not with a lobster, but with a bell.”
