Sigma360

A name flickers. A machine decides.

It is a Tuesday morning at a payments company, and a new business customer wants to move money. Ten years ago, a compliance analyst would have started Googling. Today a Sigma360 screen finishes the job before the coffee cools: the entity is resolved, its watchlist exposure checked, its mentions across 600,000 publishers scanned, its hidden relationships mapped two links deep. The answer arrives in under a second, with a confidence score and a reason. The analyst reviews instead of investigates.

That is the quiet thing Sigma360 sells. Not magic - arithmetic, performed at a speed and scale that humans gave up on years ago. The New York company has spent nearly a decade turning the grim, sprawling business of financial crime detection into something that behaves like software: a single cloud-native platform that protects, by its own count, more than two trillion dollars in assets and company value.

Everyone screens. Almost no one is right.

Here is the dirty secret of anti-money-laundering work: the alarms ring constantly, and they are almost always wrong. Industry false-positive rates run staggeringly high - analysts spend their days clearing matches that were never real, while the genuine bad actor hides in the noise. The tools were built around lists and exact names, and the world stopped cooperating with lists a long time ago.

Risk, it turns out, does not live in a record. It lives in a relationship - a shell company two hops away, a director who shares an address with a sanctioned trader, an entity spelled four different ways across three jurisdictions. The legacy stack could not see any of it. So institutions did the only rational thing: they hired more people, bought more lists, and accepted that compliance would be expensive, slow, and mostly theater.

Caption: somewhere, a false positive is being cleared by a tired human at 6 p.m. Sigma360 would like a word.

A Treasury official, a lawyer, and a hunch.

Sigma360 began life in 2017 as Sigma Ratings, billed - with a straight face - as the world's first non-credit risk ratings agency. The premise came from two people who had seen the problem from opposite ends. Stuart Jones, Jr., the CEO, is a former U.S. Treasury and National Counterterrorism Center official who chased terrorist financing and corruption after 9/11. Gabrielle Haddad, the COO, is a lawyer with emerging-markets expertise. They met the future of risk while at MIT Sloan, where the idea ran through the Delta V accelerator.

Their bet was contrarian and, in hindsight, obvious: that good corporate behavior could be measured, that trust could be scored, and that doing so would unlock cross-border finance for the people unfairly locked out by crude risk models. The "ratings agency" framing eventually gave way to something more useful - a full-stack platform - and the company rebranded to Sigma360. The mission stayed put.

Nine years, three names for the same idea.

Caption: the rebrand from "Ratings" to "360" cost a logo and saved a thesis.

One platform, where there used to be twelve vendors.

The pitch Jones likes to make is that Sigma360 is the first to put the whole job in one place: the risk data, the proprietary intelligence, the core screening engine, and the AI automation that ties them together. Most institutions had bought those pieces separately and spent years trying to make them talk. Sigma360 ships them pre-married, cloud-native, and - the detail engineers notice - deployable with low-code or no-code, on top of risk data the platform treats as agnostic.

The unglamorous heart of it is entity resolution: deciding whether the "John Smith Trading Ltd" in one record is the same outfit as a near-identical name three datasets over. Get that wrong and you either flood analysts with duplicates or miss the connection that mattered. Sigma360 claims roughly two-thirds fewer false records on average, and pairs it with interactive network graphs that surface exposure sitting two or more links away - the cousin-of-a-cousin risk that list-based tools never see. Around that sit 164 pre-built risk indicators teams can assemble into their own taxonomies, so a crypto exchange and a trade-finance bank are not forced to share one definition of "suspicious."

The numbers that survived diligence.

Plenty of regtech companies make big claims. Fewer reach profitability and keep their customers. Sigma360 did both: it turned profitable in 2025, grew fivefold over two years, and reported net revenue retention north of 140% with gross retention at 95% - the boring metrics that tell you customers expand rather than leave. Barclays, Rippling, Fitch Ratings, Magnetar Capital, Smile ID and MIT show up on its rolls, and Fitch and Barclays liked it enough to invest.

The validation is not only commercial. Chartis Research, which ranks this corner of the software world for a living, named Sigma360 the #1 adverse media screening platform two years running and slotted it as a leader in the KYC and screening quadrant. The platform carries a SOC 2 Type II certification and runs to a 99.9% uptime commitment - table stakes for selling into banks, but the kind of table stakes that quietly eliminate most startups before the first sales call. For an industry that buys on trust, the credential wall matters as much as the demo.

Caption: a chart in which the rightmost bar is doing a lot of confident talking.

Make trust legible, make crime expensive.

Strip away the product sheet and Sigma360's stated aim is unfashionably idealistic: reward good corporate behavior, increase cross-border financial activity, and give institutions a reason to bank the legitimate businesses that crude models reject. Founded by people who watched financial crime up close, the company treats every false positive as a real cost - an honest customer turned away - and every miss as a real harm.

Stuart Jones puts the engineering version more plainly: "We've built the first full-stack platform that unifies risk data, intelligence, core technology, and AI." The $17.3M Series B, led by Moderne Ventures with Vocap Partners, Orrick, Contour Ventures and Mosaik Partners, is aimed squarely at that thesis - deeper proprietary datasets, more AI automation, and a wider global footprint.

The bad actors got AI too.

The reason this is not a solved problem is that the other side is also automating. Synthetic identities, AI-generated shell networks, and money that moves at the speed of an instant payment all make the old, list-based defenses look quaint. The institutions Sigma360 serves do not get to opt out - regulators expect them to keep up, and the volume only grows. A platform that resolves entities, reads the news, and maps relationships in real time stops being a nicety and starts being the floor.

Back to that Tuesday morning. The customer wants to move money; the screen returns its verdict in under a second; the analyst approves a legitimate business that, a decade ago, might have been refused on a bad name match. That is the change Sigma360 is selling - not fewer alerts, but better ones. The coffee, for the record, is still warm.

Links, feeds & the official line.