Taktile, an AI-powered decisioning platform for banks and insurers, has appointed former Databricks engineer James Broadhead as its first Chief Technology Officer as the company expands its engineering organization and global footprint.
Broadhead brings nearly 15 years of software engineering and development experience spanning Databricks, Neon, X, formerly Twitter, and MongoDB. He will be based in Dublin and oversee Taktile’s engineering teams and technology systems as the company scales AI infrastructure for highly regulated financial institutions.
The appointment comes as Taktile experiences growing demand from banks, insurers and other financial institutions seeking to automate complex decisions using AI while maintaining reliability, compliance and human oversight.
More than 200 financial institutions currently use Taktile to power hundreds of millions of decisions, according to the company. Customers include Allianz, Mercury, Monzo and Faire.
Taktile’s Agentic Decision Platform combines AI agents, business rules, contextual information and human oversight to automate and optimize decisions across financial workflows.
Use cases include approving customers, reimbursing insurance claims and evaluating business financing applications. Taktile said its technology powers millions of decisions each day.
Broadhead joins after working at Databricks and previously holding senior engineering roles at Neon.
At Neon, he led engineering during a period of rapid growth driven partly by agentic software development. Taktile said the company’s revenue more than tripled during that period before Neon was acquired by Databricks.
That background gives Broadhead experience scaling infrastructure during periods of rapid adoption, an increasingly important capability for Taktile as financial institutions deploy AI across production environments.
In his new role, Broadhead will be responsible for ensuring Taktile’s engineering organization and systems can support expanding demand while meeting the reliability and compliance requirements of regulated industries.
The company is particularly focused on the growing role of autonomous agents in financial services.
As AI agents begin performing more complicated decisions, financial institutions must ensure those systems remain reproducible, reliable and capable of operating under clearly defined controls.
Broadhead said Taktile’s cloud-native, serverless platform already provides a foundation for that next phase of financial AI infrastructure.
The CTO appointment is part of a broader leadership restructuring.
Taktile co-founder Maximilian Eber, who previously served as Chief Product and Technology Officer, will become President and focus on the company’s strategic direction.
Thomas Piani, who has led Taktile’s product and design organizations for more than two years, is being promoted to Chief Product Officer.
The changes create more specialized leadership across technology, product and corporate strategy as Taktile expands internationally.
Taktile was founded in 2020 and operates offices in New York, London, Berlin, São Paulo and Iași.
The company recently raised a $110 million Series C led by Goldman Sachs, extending a financing history that now totals $184 million.
Investors include Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, Index Ventures, Tiger Global, Balderton Capital and Y Combinator.
The additional capital and leadership expansion position Taktile to increase investment in R&D while supporting a larger international customer base.
For banks and insurers, AI-driven decisioning can potentially reduce manual review and accelerate activities such as customer onboarding, credit decisions and claims processing.
However, financial services organizations also operate under strict regulatory and compliance requirements that make reliability and explainability especially important.
Taktile is attempting to address that tension by enabling institutions to combine autonomous AI agents with traditional rules, relevant business context and human review.
Broadhead’s appointment gives the company a dedicated technology leader as it scales that architecture across a larger number of mission-critical financial workflows.
KEY QUOTES:
“Taktile is growing rapidly across global markets, and James’ leadership will be instrumental as we expand our R&D function and global footprint. James’ extensive background and expertise in engineering will take Taktile to the next level in powering mission-critical financial decisions at scale with AI.”
Maik Taro Wehmeyer, CEO and Co-Founder of Taktile
“James is the right leader to take the helm of our engineering team. He knows what it takes to build technology for the world’s most demanding enterprises, and his experience offers a unique perspective on how products need to evolve as AI agents reliably take on more complex decisions in financial services.”
Maximilian Eber, Co-Founder and President of Taktile
“I am thrilled to join Taktile at such a pivotal moment to help architect the best AI infrastructure for financial institutions. Taktile has built a modern, cloud-native serverless platform that is already proven in production with leading financial enterprises. I’m excited to build on that foundation and help Taktile usher in the next era of AI for banking and insurance where reproducibility, reliability and efficiency at scale matter most.”
James Broadhead, Chief Technology Officer of Taktile
