When looking for a way to combine AI with Wall Street, Maik Taro Wehmeyer, CEO of AI financial services firm Taktile, decided to get real. Earlier this week, Taktile placed a 300-pound lobster statue—a symbol now associated with AI thanks to the popular OpenClaw agents in Moltbook—in front of Wall Street’s iconic Charging Bull to match the iconic face.
The stunt went quickly. Peter Steinberger, founder of OpenClaw, joined in, as did Kate Rouch, chief marketing officer of OpenAI. After the lobster was pulled after hours in Manhattan’s financial district, Wehmeyer revealed Taktile as the organizer. The event coincided with the launch of the company Taktile Labs, a new research unit focused on developing AI metrics and frameworks for financial institutions.
“Our goal at Taktile is really to bring AI safely to banks,” Wehymer told the Observer. “Now, agents can come to Wall Street and actually work with the bull, not against the bull.”
Taktile, with offices in New York, Berlin and London, was founded by Wehmeyer and Harvard classmate Maximilian Eber. The two later worked together as machine learning engineers at QuantCo, developing enterprise AI products. They soon realized that the highly regulated financial sector posed unique barriers to the use of such tools—a problem they set out to solve with Taktile.
Founded in 2020, Taktile offers an AI platform built for use in applications such as onboarding, credit, fraud detection and compliance. It counts more than 200 financial institutions as clients, including fintech firm Mercury 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 saw something new: models from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic were completing complex tasks faster and better than humans. That’s when, he said, “2026 will be the year that AI will really arrive in financial services.” But for widespread adoption to happen, banks need a reliable source to quickly translate the evolution of AI
That insight inspired the lobster template—Taktile Labs’ marketing hook. The new center aims to make AI agents more reliable and explainable through research and benchmarking. While existing benchmarks assess the performance of AI in fields such as mathematics or medicine, Wehmeyer noted that financial services still lack validated metrics for activities such as credit underwriting and transaction monitoring.
To make its point, Taktile commissioned New York-based artist Andrew Logan to create a nine-foot sculpture in just ten days. Constructed of a metal-fiberglass composite, the piece was finished in bronze to match Arturo Di Modica’s Charging Bull, a Financial District installation from 1989.
“With Taktile Labs, we want to focus on one question, which is: what does it take for financial institutions to confidently deploy AI in executive decisions?” Wehmeyer said. The program’s findings will be public and led by a research council that includes Ben Liebald, vice president of engineering at Harvey; Fagner Abreu, chief credit risk officer at Bradesco; and Jonas Nelle, who leads Cursor engineering on asynchronous agents.
The financial services industry, which spent $58 billion on AI in 2025, is expected to increase that amount to $97 billion by 2027, according to Statista. However adoption still lags behind the progress of AI technology. Taktile joins a crowded field of competitors, including Provenir, Sperta and Scienaptic, all of which are fighting to close that gap.
After watching other industries transform with AI, Wehmeyer believes finance is next—and he aims to lead that transformation. Then, one day, we will return to Wall Street. Not with lobster, but with steel.
