sanctions-screening
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Solytics Partners and the art of questioning the machine
A bank can buy a clever model and still inherit a foolish process. Solytics Partners sells the testing, governance and financial-crime tools that make the machinery answer for itself.
Verisys and the trouble with a clean record
A healthcare provider can pass a background check on Monday and become a problem on Tuesday. Verisys has built a business around the inconvenient space between those two days.
ThetaRay wants banks to catch more crime by chasing fewer alerts
A payments company buried in false alarms is a peculiar kind of detective agency. ThetaRay’s wager is that better patterns, sharper context and less paperwork can give the investigators their day back.
Sayari and the Art of Following the Paper
A company can have a spotless name and a rather inconvenient family tree. Sayari connects corporate records and trade routes to show banks, businesses, and investigators who is really on the other side of a deal.
WorkFusion and the Fortune in False Alarms
Banks built machines to spot suspicious names. Then they hired armies to explain why the machines were wrong. WorkFusion found its business in that second job.
The Bank Alarm That Learned to Ask Better Questions
SymphonyAI Sensa-NetReveal joined an established bank compliance system to a newer kind of pattern detection. Its most interesting result is not another alarm, but fewer bad ones.
Pelican.ai and the expensive art of the false alarm
A payment can travel the world and still get stuck on a name. Pelican.ai has spent three decades teaching banking software to untangle the instructions, checks and false alarms that hold money up.
Elliptic follows the money. Banks are following Elliptic.
The bitcoin-vault startup became a business built around an awkward question: where did this money come from? Now a $120 million funding round is backing its next push into crypto compliance.
Pole Star Global: From telephone boxes to the dark fleet
A delayed shipment of British telephone boxes helped inspire a ship-tracking business. Today, Pole Star Global sells the intelligence behind decisions to charter vessels, finance cargo and investigate ships with something to hide.
Facctum Wants Banks to Stop Chasing the Wrong Names
A familiar name can send a payment into a compliance queue. Facctum is tackling the data, screening and review work that decides whether it belongs there.
The Software That Turns Financial Crime Investigators Into Case-Closing Machines
Anti-money-laundering work is where good design goes to die. Hummingbird bet the opposite - that compliance investigators deserve tools as sharp as the criminals they chase.
YC World
YC World is a counterparty and corporate network risk investigation platform built by Ukrainian open-data developer YouControl. It consolidates official company records, ownership networks, sanctions lists, politically exposed persons and other risk signals across 80+ jurisdictions into a single searchable, graph-based workspace, helping compliance teams, investigators and law enforcement run AML, KYC and KYB checks and expose hidden ownership and sanctioned connections.
Merkle Science
Merkle Science is a blockchain analytics and predictive risk intelligence company that helps crypto exchanges, financial institutions, government agencies and Web3 businesses detect, investigate and prevent illicit cryptocurrency activity. Founded in Singapore in 2018 by Mriganka Pattnaik and Nirmal Ak, it uses behavior-based machine learning rather than static blacklists to power its two core products - Compass for real-time transaction monitoring and compliance (AML/KYC/CFT), and Tracker for cross-chain forensic investigations across 10,000+ assets and 200+ bridges.
NICE Actimize
NICE Actimize is the financial-crime, risk and compliance division of NICE Ltd. and one of the largest providers of anti-money laundering, fraud prevention and trading-surveillance software to banks, regulators and financial institutions worldwide. Its AI-driven X-Sight platform, ActOne case management and SURVEIL-X surveillance suite help more than a thousand institutions detect suspicious activity, screen against sanctions lists, manage regulatory reporting and investigate financial crime - increasingly using agentic AI to cut investigation time.
Silent Eight
Silent Eight is a Singapore-headquartered regtech company that builds purpose-built artificial intelligence for financial crime compliance. Its Iris platform automates name screening, transaction screening, transaction monitoring, investigation and case documentation for banks, producing decisions with written, auditable narratives instead of black-box scores. The company is used by Tier 1 institutions including HSBC and Standard Chartered, and has raised roughly $55 million to date, including a $40 million Series B in 2022.
Flagright
Flagright is an AI-native financial crime compliance platform that gives fintechs, banks, and crypto firms a single system for transaction monitoring, sanctions and watchlist screening, dynamic risk scoring, case management, and regulatory filing. Founded in 2022 by Baran Ozkan and Madhu G. Nadig after Baran spent roughly 18 months failing to find a real-time monitoring vendor he liked, the company sells what it calls an 'AI operating system for compliance' - including an agentic investigation engine, AI Forensics, that runs alert investigations end to end. It serves 100+ financial institutions across 35+ countries and raised a $12.5M Series A in June 2026.
Arva AI
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.
Parcha
Parcha is a San Francisco AI company building enterprise-grade AI agents that automate compliance and operations work for banks and fintechs. Founded in 2023 by former Brex leaders AJ Asver and Miguel Rios-Berrios, its Agent Hub platform lets compliance teams create, test, and deploy agents in minutes to run KYC/KYB reviews, enhanced due diligence, AML screening, and document verification - work that traditionally requires large operations teams. Backed by $5M in seed funding led by Kindred Ventures and Initialized Capital, Parcha counts fintechs like Bridge, Airwallex, Flutterwave, and Pipe among its users.
Sphinx
Sphinx builds browser-native AI agents that do the work of a human compliance analyst - running AML, KYC, KYB and enhanced due diligence reviews inside the case-management tools banks and fintechs already use. Every decision is logged and explainable, producing a regulator-ready audit trail. Founded in 2024 by Alexandre Berkovic and Chrisjan Wust and backed by Y Combinator, Sphinx raised a $7.1M seed round in early 2026 and now runs in production across banks, fintechs, crypto platforms and public companies in eight countries.
ComplyAdvantage
ComplyAdvantage is a London-founded RegTech company that uses AI and machine learning to help banks, fintechs and other regulated businesses detect and prevent financial crime. Its flagship Mesh platform combines a proprietary, real-time database of sanctions, watchlists, politically exposed persons (PEPs) and adverse media with customer screening, transaction monitoring, payment screening and fraud detection - automating the heavy, error-prone work of anti-money-laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) compliance for more than 3,000 enterprises across roughly 75 countries.
Altana
Altana builds the AI-powered network for trusted global trade - a dynamic, intelligent map of the world's supply chains. Using federated machine learning, it connects businesses, the largest logistics providers, and government agencies around a shared, privacy-preserving source of product and supplier intelligence, helping them manage compliance, tariffs, risk, and resilience across multi-tier supply networks.
Castellum.AI
Castellum.AI is a New York-based regulatory technology company that automates anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer compliance for banks, credit unions, fintechs and crypto firms. Its platform pairs in-house risk data drawn from 200,000+ global sources with explainable AI agents that screen for sanctions, politically exposed persons and adverse media, cutting alert volume by 94% and review time by 83% out of the box. Founded by a former U.S. Treasury sanctions officer, the company raised an $8.5M Series A in July 2025 led by Curql.
Sigma360
Sigma360 is a New York-based risk intelligence company that helps banks, payment firms, fintechs and global corporations detect and manage financial crime. Its cloud-native, AI-powered platform unifies global risk data, proprietary intelligence, core screening technology and automation to surface direct and network-based risk at sub-second speed, cut false positives, and run perpetual KYC, sanctions and adverse media screening. Founded in 2017 as Sigma Ratings, the company protects more than $2 trillion in assets and company value.