Sentinels, a transaction monitoring startup, has closed its seed round on €5.7m to support the development of its products.
The round was led by INKEF Capital, with commitments also coming from strategic angel investors and industry leaders, including members of the Sentinels team.
Capital from the round will be used to expand its operations into the UK and beyond Europe to North America, LatAm and APAC.
With the close of the round, the company has netted a total of £7.3m in funding.
Based in the Netherlands, the company launched 18 months ago by Joost van Houten as a spin-out of Slimmer AI. The company claims that unlike legacy compliance technology, its platform starts by analysing internal data siloes and augmenting them with external sources, such as adverse media and sanctions lists.
Machine learning models and graph networks will then sift through the data and find suspicious cases.
Joost van Houten said, “In less than five years, we’ve seen countless companies enter the compliance space and a 10x increase in the number of compliance staff – and yet money laundering still remains a significant challenge for financial institutions.
“The big issue is that legacy technology is increasingly out-of-step with the needs of FinTechs and other fast-growing institutions. Excessive reports and an unacceptably high number of false alarms puts undue resourcing pressure on companies that should be targeting growth, instead of being waylaid by time-consuming compliance admin.
“Our aim is to help financial institutions keep track of who their customers really are and how they behave – not only to understand risks, but also to serve them better.”
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