Breaking

Silent Eight wins ICA Compliance AI Solution of the Year 2025 Iris 7 launches with policy-bound AI agents $40M Series B closed - HSBC Ventures & SC Ventures on board Trusted by Tier 1 banks HSBC and Standard Chartered Named Top 100 Financial Technology Company of 2024 ~$55M raised to date - HQ Singapore Silent Eight wins ICA Compliance AI Solution of the Year 2025 Iris 7 launches with policy-bound AI agents $40M Series B closed - HSBC Ventures & SC Ventures on board Trusted by Tier 1 banks HSBC and Standard Chartered Named Top 100 Financial Technology Company of 2024 ~$55M raised to date - HQ Singapore

The Compliance Dispatch · Regtech Edition Singapore · Est. 2013

Financial Crime · Artificial Intelligence

Silent Eight

The company teaching AI to explain itself - clearing millions of compliance alerts, and writing down exactly why for each one.

2013

Founded

$55M

Raised

~150

Team

Tier 1

Bank clients

SILENT EIGHT. The Singapore-born regtech firm behind Iris - the platform Tier 1 banks use to screen names, monitor payments and document decisions. Photo: Silent Eight brand material, Iris 7.

What it does

A quiet engine inside the bank, deciding whether a payment is clean

Every large bank runs a machine most customers never see. It scans names against sanctions lists, watches transactions for laundering, and flags anything that looks off. The problem is scale: the machine throws off hundreds of thousands of alerts, and the overwhelming majority are false alarms. Silent Eight builds the artificial intelligence that reads those alerts, decides which ones are real, and - crucially - writes down the reasoning a human and a regulator can check.

Founded in 2013 by Martin Markiewicz, Julia Markiewicz and Michael Wilkowski, the company set out with a narrow mission: apply purpose-built AI to financial crime compliance. Its flagship product, the Iris platform, now spans the full compliance lifecycle - screening, investigation, transaction monitoring, case documentation and quality assurance. The latest version, Iris 7, introduces policy-bound AI agents that work within a bank's own rules rather than around them.

Silent Eight builds purpose-built AI for financial crime compliance - trained not on a single large language model, but on smaller, task-specific models.

On the company's technical approach

The problems it solves

False positives cost time, money and patience

Compliance teams spend most of their day on triage. An analyst opens an alert, checks it against sanctions and adverse-media data, decides whether it is a genuine risk, and documents that decision for auditors. Repeat, thousands of times. The bottleneck is not detection - it is resolution. Silent Eight aims squarely at that bottleneck.

Alert overload

Screening systems flag far more than can be reviewed. Iris lowers alert volumes without lowering risk coverage.

Black-box AI

Regulators cannot accept a decision they cannot read. Silent Eight's neuro-symbolic models explain, in words, why an alert was raised or closed.

Manual paperwork

Every decision needs a documented rationale. Iris drafts auditable case narratives automatically, turning decisions into records.

How it's different

Small models, shown work

The obvious move in 2023 was to wire everything to one large language model. Silent Eight did not. Instead it trains a collection of small, task-specific models - one whose only job, for example, is knowing that a single person's name can be spelled a dozen different ways as it travels across languages and alphabets.

Paired with symbolic reasoning, that approach lets the AI both detect risk and justify its conclusion. In a field where an unexplained decision is a liability, transparency is not a feature bolted on at the end - it is the product. That is also why two of the biggest banks in the world were willing to embed it.

Growth, Oct 2020 → 2022 Series B

Revenue growth6x

Workforce3x

Valuation4x

Figures reported around the March 2022 Series B. Bar lengths are illustrative of relative multiples.

Products & services

The Iris platform, layer by layer

2025 · Flagship

Iris Platform (Iris 7)

Unifies screening, investigation, monitoring, documentation and QA across the compliance lifecycle, with policy-bound AI agents.

2018

Name Screening Adjudicator

Neuro-symbolic AI that checks customer and counterparty names against sanctions and watchlists, resolving and explaining each alert.

2020

Transaction Screening

Automated adjudication of payment screening alerts - cutting false positives while holding risk coverage.

2022

Transaction Monitoring

Behavioral analysis that surfaces anomalies and customer-risk patterns earlier in the transaction flow.

2023

Case Building & Documentation

Generates auditable case narratives and investigation write-ups, turning a decision into a regulator-ready record.

2024

Quality Assurance & Controls

Automated sampling, model validation and screening audits for full oversight - no black boxes.

Who uses it

Tier 1 banks - some of whom also invest

Silent Eight sells to compliance, sanctions and financial-crime operations teams inside large financial institutions. Standard Chartered deployed its AI in sanctions operations as far back as 2018; HSBC signed a multi-year partnership in 2021 and folded the technology into its global compliance infrastructure. Deployments have since expanded across Gulf banks including Emirates NBD, Mashreq, First Abu Dhabi Bank and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank.

HSBC Standard Chartered Emirates NBD Mashreq First Abu Dhabi Bank Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank

Two of Silent Eight's biggest customers, HSBC and Standard Chartered, are also investors. When the people using your product write you a check, you have solved a real problem.

The business model, in one detail

Business model: B2B enterprise SaaS. Silent Eight licenses the Iris platform and its AI adjudication models to banks under multi-year contracts, integrating with the systems they already run - a quiet infrastructure play rather than a consumer brand.

Funding

~$55M across three rounds

Round	Amount	Date	Notable investors
Seed	Undisclosed	Sep 2015	Wavemaker Partners
Series A	$6.2M	Nov 2019	OTB Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, SC Ventures
Series B	$40M	Mar 2022	TYH Ventures (lead), HSBC Ventures, SC Ventures, Aglaia Family Office

The 2022 Series B brought total capital raised to roughly $55M. Valuation was not disclosed but reported to quadruple the October 2020 figure.

The founders

Three founders, nearly two decades together

Co-Founder & CEO

Martin Markiewicz

Mathematician and serial founder across Europe and Asia; leads strategy and the company's bet that purpose-built AI can tackle financial crime.

Co-Founder & COO

Julia Markiewicz

Runs operations, scaling the company from a Singapore accelerator to Tier 1 bank deployments.

Co-Founder & CTO

Michael Wilkowski

Oversees research, development and delivery - the engineering behind Iris and its explainable models.

Timeline

From a Singapore accelerator to global banks

2013

Silent Eight founded

Three co-founders set out to fight financial crime with AI.

2015

Accelerator & seed round

Joined JFDI.Asia in Singapore and raised a seed round led by Wavemaker Partners.

2018

Standard Chartered deployment

The bank put Silent Eight's AI to work in its sanctions compliance operations.

2019

Series A

Raised $6.2M from OTB Ventures, Wavemaker Partners and SC Ventures.

2021

HSBC partnership

Signed a multi-year deal to embed alert resolution technology in HSBC's global compliance stack.

2022

$40M Series B

Closed a round led by TYH Ventures with HSBC Ventures and SC Ventures, reaching ~$55M total.

2024

Gulf expansion & Top 100

Grew across Middle East banks and was named a Top 100 Financial Technology Company of 2024.

2025

Iris 7 & ICA award

Launched Iris 7 and won ICA's Compliance AI Solution of the Year 2025 (Europe).

Where it fits

The regtech field it competes in

Silent Eight sits in the anti-money-laundering and financial-crime compliance corner of regtech, alongside firms such as NICE Actimize, ComplyAdvantage, Feedzai, Featurespace, Napier, Quantexa, SymphonyAI and Hawk AI. Its wedge in that crowded market is explainability - decisions that come with written, auditable reasoning rather than opaque scores - and a preference for narrow, task-specific models over a single general-purpose one.

Notable details

Things worth knowing

The name nods to "888" - eight is a lucky number in many Asian cultures, fitting for a Singapore-founded firm.

Its X/Twitter handle is @whereiseight - literally asking "where is eight?"

Silent Eight deliberately avoided building on a single large language model, training narrow task-specific models instead.

The founding trio had worked together for close to 20 years before scaling the company.

FAQ

Questions people ask

What does Silent Eight do?

It builds purpose-built AI for financial crime compliance - automating name screening, transaction screening, transaction monitoring, investigation and documentation for banks through its Iris platform.

Who are Silent Eight's customers?

Tier 1 and large financial institutions, including HSBC and Standard Chartered, plus Middle East banks such as Emirates NBD, Mashreq, First Abu Dhabi Bank and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank.

How much funding has Silent Eight raised?

Roughly $55 million to date, including a $40 million Series B in March 2022 led by TYH Ventures with HSBC Ventures and SC Ventures.

Who founded Silent Eight?

Co-founders Martin Markiewicz (CEO), Julia Markiewicz (COO) and Michael Wilkowski (CTO), a team that had worked together for nearly two decades.

How is it different from other compliance AI?

Its neuro-symbolic AI produces written, auditable explanations for every decision rather than opaque scores, and it uses small task-specific models instead of a single large language model.