risk-and-compliance
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Storm2 and the art of knowing fewer people better
The fintech recruiter built its business on a small proposition: know one market deeply enough to make the right introduction. Its move toward America reveals both the power of that idea and the limits of expansion.
Outsized
Outsized is a curated talent-on-demand platform that connects large enterprises and consulting firms with vetted independent consultants, subject-matter experts, interims and fractional professionals across Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East. Founded in 2016 and focused on financial services, it pairs management-consulting rigor with deep industry domain expertise, handling matching, contracting, invoicing and payments so clients can staff transformation, risk, data and digital projects in days rather than months.
Ardoq
Ardoq is a Norwegian enterprise architecture software company that helps large organizations map, understand, and transform their technology and business landscapes. Its cloud-based, graph-powered platform turns tangled application portfolios, data flows, and business capabilities into living, queryable models so leaders can plan cloud migrations, rationalize applications, manage risk, and steer digital transformation with current data rather than static diagrams. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Oslo, Ardoq serves more than 400 enterprises worldwide and has pushed toward an AI-first approach that reasons over the architecture graph.
Variance
Variance builds investigative AI agents that automate risk and compliance work for banks, fintechs, and Fortune 500 platforms - handling KYC, KYB, AML, transaction monitoring, and fraud investigations that would otherwise take teams of analysts days to complete. Founded in 2023 by ex-Apple fraud engineers Karine Mellata and Michael Lin (originally as the trust-and-safety startup Intrinsic), the company raised a $21.5M Series A in March 2026 led by Ten Eleven Ventures.
Accend
Accend builds human-in-the-loop AI agents that automate commercial credit underwriting for banks and fintechs. The San Francisco startup, founded in 2023 by ex-Brex risk operators, ingests financial documents and tax filings, spreads financial statements, models cash flow, and drafts credit memos - with every AI-generated spread reviewed by human analysts. Customers report application processing times cut by up to 80%, and the company positions itself as a replacement for offshore BPO spreading teams.
FORA
FORA is a New York-based AI communication intelligence platform built for enterprise leadership. It captures and analyzes conversations from meetings, email, chat, and CRM systems, then turns that qualitative data into secure, actionable insights - flagging risks, eliminating shadow data, auto-updating OKRs, and surfacing what the C-suite actually needs to know. Founded in 2024 by serial HR-tech entrepreneur Joe Essenfeld, the company launched with $3.8 million in pre-seed funding led by Converge.