ENAnti-financial crime AI-platform ComplyAdvantage raises $30 million to tackle terrorist funding, money-laundering and fraud
LONDON, January 30, 2019 — ComplyAdvantage has raised USD $30 million from investors to accelerate the global expansion of its machine-learning platform for analyzing the risk of financial crime. By swiftly and intelligently verifying parties and transactions, ComplyAdvantage fundamentally changes how companies assess who they’re doing business with – offering organizations greater confidence in their own operations, attacking financial crime and reducing laborious manual checks. ComplyAdvantage has a growing list of 350 clients in 45 countries across the US, Europe and Asia, including major global banks.
Index Ventures, the London and San Francisco-based venture capital firm, led the Series B round and were joined in the round by existing investor Balderton Capital. Jan Hammer, Partner at Index Ventures who led the firm’s investments in Adyen and Robinhood, joins the ComplyAdvantage board.
As the global economy becomes increasingly complex and interconnected, it’s now more vital – but also more difficult – than ever to get a clear picture of the entity on the other side of the table during a transaction or business relationship. Geopolitical instability, lengthening supply chains, increased migration and the growth of emerging markets all put pressure on companies to improve their standards for verifying the risk and legitimacy of counterparties and payments.
While financial crime and ‘know your customer’ rules are ComplyAdvantage’s near-term focus, the company is building a comprehensive global repository that provides an instant, accurate risk profile for every commercial entity and individual in the world.
‘We exist because globalization is intensifying the business problems of trust,’ says ComplyAdvantage’s CEO and founder Charles Delingpole, who previously founded MarketInvoice. ‘To offset concerns, many businesses can be hyper-cautious and conservative, losing out on commercial opportunities – in some cases abandoning entire countries or industries.’
In the post-9/11 environment, companies have been spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year to understand who they’re doing business with. But businesses are typically reliant on ineffective solutions that generate large amounts of manual work, plus silos of data that have patchy coverage and can’t easily be combined. The system is beset with false positives which divert attention from following up on genuine red flags. Multiple scandals, where banks have been fined billions of dollars for facilitating illegal activity, point to the ongoing reputational and commercial dangers of getting things wrong.1
ComplyAdvantage solves the problem by using innovative deep learning and machine intelligence. The company’s self-improving algorithms absorb and scour millions of structured and unstructured data sources daily – including registers of high-level national and international sanctions, individuals who should be treated with caution, and adverse media coverage. As a result, ComplyAdvantage builds a holistic snapshot of an entity’s risk in real-time and spots nuanced patterns across users and transactions that would elude a human assessor. The company also lets clients tailor the product to focus on parameters that are particularly relevant to them. On average, ComplyAdvantage reduces the rate of false positives by 70 percent.
Jan Hammer, Index Ventures partner, says: ‘Historically, financial crime tends to run ahead of the means of catching it; remedies have been reactive. Today, the problems are getting bigger, the risks and the penalties are more severe, and the old system can’t cope. ComplyAdvantage has a completely new approach, giving companies the power to get a fast, sophisticated understanding of where their risks lie.’
Hammer adds: ‘We’ve been impressed by their traction with a wide range of customers, including their capacity to attract some of the world’s largest banks. The bigger vision – to get a complete picture of risk for all people and companies globally – has real potential to shake up the market.’
About ComplyAdvantage
ComplyAdvantage helps firms make intelligent risk decisions, faster. They provide data intelligence to help firms understand the risk of who they’re doing business with, while automating compliance and risk processes.
ComplyAdvantage takes a new approach to building financial crime data by providing real-time insight into the risk of people and companies globally. Broader coverage allows ComplyAdvantage to spot tens of thousands of risk events from within millions of structured and unstructured data sources, every day. ComplyAdvantage’s suite of plug-and-play configurable cloud services seamlessly integrate to help automate and comply with Sanctions, AML and CTF regulations.
ComplyAdvantage partners with over 350 customers from more than 45 countries and with a team of 160 people across offices in New York, London, Singapore and Cluj. ComplyAdvantage has seen 300% revenue growth in the past 12 months alone and has rapidly expanded in the US, having signed its 100th customer. To learn more visit complyadvantage.com
About Index Ventures
Index is a London and San Francisco-based international venture capital firm that helps the most ambitious entrepreneurs turn bold ideas into global businesses. Index-backed companies that are reshaping the world around us include Adyen, Deliveroo, Dropbox, Elastic, Funding Circle and Slack. To learn more, visit www.indexventures.com.
About Balderton Capital
Balderton Capital is Europe’s largest early-stage venture capital investor, focused on European technology companies at Series A. Based in London, the firm manages $2.7bn and invests in entrepreneurs building globally ambitious businesses. Balderton’s Partners include the founders and operational leaders of multi-billion dollar companies including Business Objects, Dropbox, Uber and Autonomy; Previous investments include Betfair (FTSE: BET), Magic Pony (Twitter), NaturalMotion (Zynga), Sunrise (Microsoft), Talend (NASDAQ: TLND) and Yoox Net-a-Porter (BIT: YNAP). Among Balderton’s current portfolio of 85 companies are: Aircall, Carwow, Citymapper, ComplyAdvantage, Contentful, Frontier Car Group, GoCardless, The Hut Group, Kobalt Music, Nutmeg, Prodigy Finance, Recorded Future, Revolut, ROLI, SOPHiA Genetics, Vestiaire Collective, and Vivino.