ComplyAdvantage, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help firms manage their compliance obligations, has raised $8.2 million in a Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital.
The funding will allow the 2014-founded, London-based RegTech firm to grow and increase product penetration across Europe and North America, as its New York office officially opens this week.
With financial crime becoming ever more sophisticated and endemic, ComplyAdvantage’s solutions cover three main areas: a data feed of proprietary AML risk data; an on-boarding screening and monitoring platform for ‘know your customer’ (KYC) processes; and a real-time transaction monitoring platform to detect suspicious customer behaviours. It is already enjoying early success, with some 200 clients globally and a team of 50 across London, Romania and now New York.
“Compliance is painful, slow and expensive,” said Charles Delingpole (pictured), founder of ComplyAdvantage, who previously worked at J.P. Morgan Cazenove and also co-founded invoice trading website Marketinvoice in 2011. “It is a huge overhead for firms and there is a massive opportunity to unlock this through technology. At one of my earlier businesses, I was the guy who would have gone to prison if we got compliance wrong, and I found it incredibly difficult to rapidly and safely assess the potential risk of my customers using the existing data and software on the market. To make matters worse, the tools generally generated a huge amount of manual work. So I decided to do something about it. This investment is testament to the incredible things the team has achieved so far and we look forward to taking our business to the next level with Balderton’s support and expertise.”
Balderton Capital is one of the largest Europe-focused venture funds, and a major investor in early stage technology and data companies.
“In compliance, we see lots of entrants with a new workflow, or user-interface tool that is just repackaging the same data. ComplyAdvantage is doing something different, by developing its own proprietary global data set of individuals and companies that pose a threat”, said Tim Bunting, general partner, Balderton Capital.
Chris Pilling, previously founder of Complinet, and former-SVP of Compliance and Regulatory Risk at Thomson Reuters, is now a strategic board advisor to, and investor in ComplyAdvantage.