Arva AI builds enterprise-grade AI agents that do the manual grunt work of financial crime compliance - screening, KYB/KYC onboarding, and transaction monitoring - for regulated banks and fintechs. Its agents autonomously resolve the majority of alerts and reviews (roughly 91% of screening alerts, 87% of KYB/KYC assessments, and 86% of transaction-monitoring alerts), cutting onboarding times from days to seconds and compliance operations spend by up to 80%. Founded in 2024 by Rhim Shah and Oli Wales and part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, the New York-based company raised a $3M seed round led by Google's Gradient Ventures in January 2025.
Rhim Shah is the co-founder and CEO of Arva AI, a Y Combinator and Google AI Fund-backed startup building auditable AI agents that automate financial crime compliance reviews for banks and fintechs. An Oxford engineering graduate who led the FinCrime product team at Revolut Business, he spent hundreds of hours shadowing compliance analysts before deciding the mundane, repetitive work of AML, KYB and KYC could be done faster and deeper by AI. Arva now automates as much as 80-92% of manual review work and counts leading UK and US banks among its customers.