Veteran banking and fintech executive Derek White has unveiled his latest venture, an AI agent operating system purpose-built for regulated financial institutions.
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Primitive is an end-to-end system for creating, deploying, and governing agentic execution, promising to help banks to move beyond fragmented AI pilots into governed, production-scale deployment.
The startup is the brainchild of Derek White, who was most recently CEO of SoFi-owned API and payments platform Galileo. Before that, he had stints as head of Google Cloud’s FS business and chief digital officer at US Bank.
White has secured seed funding for Primitive from Fin Capital and Pelion Venture Partners as well as entry to startup programmes including NVIDIA Inception, Microsoft for Startups, and Google for Startups.
The Primitive platform consists of the ‘Engine Room’, which connects AI agents — including third parties — directly to enterprise systems without replacing them; the ‘Assembler’, which builds from a use case to a production-ready agent in 90 days; and the ‘Control Tower’, which delivers governance through logging, tracing, and independently validating that every agent action is compliant, as well as measuring performance.
The business is launching with a set of pre-built agent templates across commercial lending, human-in-the-loop operations, risk and compliance, deep research, and regulatory oversight.
Says White: “The bank executives who have helped us shape Primitive all face a common, critical challenge: they know AI is the future, but they cannot risk the reputation or stability of their institution on unproven systems.
“The challenge isn’t access to AI — it’s integrating, governing, and proving the return on it at enterprise scale. Having lived this problem from inside some of the world’s largest financial institutions, we built Primitive to give leaders the control and clarity required to move AI from a pilot to a core business driver where agents execute and people lead.”
In conjunction with its launch, Primitive is forming a strategic partnership with MX Technologies. a data and software provider for over 1,700 financial institutions. As part of the partnership, the companies are developing an AI-native Growth Agent designed to help banks and credit unions build on the current MX offerings.
