● BREAKING — Sphinx raises $7.1M seed led by Cherry Ventures ● Live agents in 8 countries ● Alviere automates 86% of compliance cases Six-month backlog cleared in two days ● Backed by Y Combinator (F24) ● Partnership with TRM Labs SOC 2 Type II certified ● BREAKING — Sphinx raises $7.1M seed led by Cherry Ventures ● Live agents in 8 countries ● Alviere automates 86% of compliance cases Six-month backlog cleared in two days ● Backed by Y Combinator (F24) ● Partnership with TRM Labs SOC 2 Type II certified
Company Dossier · RegTech / AI

SPHINX

The last compliance hire a bank ever makes - and it never sleeps, never skips a source, and logs every reason.

Sphinx company logo
THE MARK — Sphinx's wordmark. Named for the riddle-keeper of myth; here it screens the riddles of financial crime, one alert at a time.
The Scene

A queue that used to age like risk

Somewhere tonight, a compliance analyst is staring at an alert queue that only grows. Each item is a small mystery: is this transfer clean, or is it a laundered dollar wearing a suit? The regulator does not want speed. The regulator wants reasons. And reasons take time - reading PDFs, cross-checking sanctions lists, hunting a beneficial owner three shell companies deep.

Sphinx is the company betting that this work no longer belongs to a human at 11pm. Its browser-native AI agents log into the same case-management tools an analyst uses, click through the same portals, gather the same evidence, and draft the same disposition - then write down exactly why. Not a chatbot bolted onto the side. An analyst that lives inside the software you already own.

By The Numbers

The math of doing it faster

87%
Fewer false positives
98%
Cases resolved same day
4.2x
Lower ops cost
27%
More true positives found
8
Countries live
What It Does

Four agents, one compliance lifecycle

Sphinx breaks the job of a compliance team into four working agents. No engineering integration required - they run on top of the systems already in place.

01 / Onboard

Onboard

Customer onboarding and KYC/KYB without the friction - fewer drop-offs, sharper risk detection at the front door.

02 / Enrich

Enrich

Turns fragmented data from portals, PDFs, email and internal dashboards into structured, actionable intelligence.

03 / Assess

Assess

Reviews alerts and runs AML, sanctions, PEP and adverse-media checks, then drafts a disposition - analyst still in the loop.

04 / Manage

Manage

Controls the whole journey: transaction monitoring, EDD and regulator-ready SAR/UAR reporting with a full audit trail.

“Building in compliance so compliance doesn’t have to exist.”
— Sphinx, company mission
From The Field

What operators say

“We went from a six-month alert review backlog to a clean queue in two days.”

Matt Hewins · FinCrime Lead

“Reviews now take minutes. Time to resolution is 10x faster.”

Francis Forde · Chief Compliance Officer

“Sphinx massively increased our capacity, letting us keep growing without adding headcount.”

James Simcox · COO

The Builders

Two founders, one riddle

They met in Cape Town, built an audio-AI startup together, then reconnected to tackle a harder problem: making financial-crime work explainable at scale.

Alexandre Berkovic

Co-founder & CEO

Came up through AI research at Imperial College London and MIT. Now the face of Sphinx's push into regulated production environments.

Chrisjan Wust

Co-founder & CTO

Early employee at RelyComply, where he helped build AML and onboarding infrastructure serving 15M+ users. Previously Head of ML there.

The Money & The Moves

Seed round, serious backers

$7.1M
SEED · ANNOUNCED FEB 2026
  • Cherry Ventures — lead
  • Y Combinator
  • Rebel Fund
  • Deel Ventures
  • Singularity Capital
  • 2024
    Founded in San Francisco; joins Y Combinator's Fall 2024 batch.
  • Jan 2026
    Case study: Alviere automates 86% of its compliance cases with Sphinx.
  • Feb 2026
    Raises $7.1M seed led by Cherry Ventures.
  • Feb 2026
    Partners with TRM Labs to bring blockchain intelligence into AI-powered AML.
Marginalia

Things worth knowing

  • The pitch is literally the product name of a job: “Your last compliance hire.”
  • Named for the riddle-keeper of myth - fitting for software that screens the riddles of financial crime.
  • Agents don’t replace your tools. They log into them and click around like a human analyst.
  • Every decision is logged and explainable by design - which is what makes automated compliance insurable.
  • The founders previously built Adorno AI, an audio-generation startup, before pivoting to financial crime.
Back To The Queue

The analyst goes home

Return to that analyst and the queue that never emptied. In the version Sphinx is selling, the queue is already clear by morning - not because the work vanished, but because an agent did it overnight and left a paper trail a regulator can read. The alerts still get investigated. The reasons still get written down. The difference is that a human wasn’t the bottleneck.

Whether “your last compliance hire” is the boldest promise in regtech or simply a very good pitch, Sphinx has picked the one job nobody wanted and made it the point. Eight countries in, millions of alerts deep, the company is betting that the future of compliance isn’t more people reading PDFs at 11pm. It’s a login.