Steward, an AI-first compliance platform trusted with $100bn in investor assets, has raised $5m to automate AML/KYC onboarding for sophisticated investors.
The round was led by Motive Partners, with participation from Outward VC, Cooley, and a group of founders and operators. The financing was heavily oversubscribed and supported by prominent angel investors including Shai Wininger, co-founder of Lemonade and Fiverr, Mark Ransford, a FinTech angel investor, Tom Keiser, former COO of Zendesk and Carta, Remy Astié and Ulric Musset, co-founders of Vauban, Mushegh Tovmasyan, founder of Zenus Bank, and Keith Grose, UK CEO of Coinbase.
The funding will be used to expand product capabilities and continue to scale the team. Steward is dual-headquartered in New York and London.
The platform brings document collection, screening, risk assessment, and periodic reviews into a single workflow, with AI agents designed to interpret layered ownership and cross-border structures. Shareable Investor Profiles allow firms to exchange AML/KYC data securely with counterparties to accelerate dealmaking. Steward says the platform enables same-day onboarding in 80% of cases, regardless of investor complexity. Notable users include Connect Ventures, Unruly Capital and IAB Group, alongside lead investors Motive Partners and Outward VC, as well as a number of Tier 1 institutional allocators.
Steward focuses on automating compliance for the investor types that challenge traditional systems — fund-of-funds, family offices and offshore trusts. These structures, common in institutional capital, have historically exposed weaknesses in AML/KYC infrastructure, resulting in manual reviews, disconnected tools and perpetual remediation cycles that can delay deals by weeks or months. By targeting these complex onboarding cases, Steward positions itself as critical infrastructure for regulated firms including private markets funds, banks, brokers and UCITS managers.
The company was founded by operators with direct experience of the problem. CEO Arik Oslerne was previously COO at Vauban, the private markets infrastructure platform that was acquired by Carta, giving him direct exposure to where onboarding breaks down in institutional capital. CTO Moshe Lieberman was the first employee at Lemonade and an early engineer at Fiverr.
Steward co-founder and CEO Arik Oslerne said, “Compliance has been a linear scaling problem for years. Firms can’t handle the amount of work on their plate with their existing resources, and face endless remediations and regulatory scrutiny. AI is the only way to put this to rest – and that’s exactly what Steward was built for.”
Motive Partners partner Hugo Bongers said, “Compliance is at an inflection point. Firms can no longer scale manual processes, and investors are demanding improved experiences. Steward is well positioned to become foundational infrastructure for investor lifecycle management.”
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