Resistant AI extends Series A to $27.6M with new funding from Notion Capital to boost fight against rapidly evolving financial crime

New investment adds to funding from GV, Index Ventures, Credo Ventures, and Seedcamp and responds to increasing demand from fintechs and financial institutions to tackle automated, AI-driven attacks.

PRAGUE—Resistant AI, an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning security company that protects financial services from financial crime, today announced it has expanded its Series A funding to $27.6 million, having raised an additional $11 million investment from Notion Capital. This adds to the existing funding from investors including GV, Index Ventures, Credo Ventures, and Seedcamp.

The new investment builds on Resistant AI’s expansion of its product, team, and geographical presence to meet the growing demand from financial institutions to protect their onboarding and transaction systems from malicious attacks.

At present, as many as 17% of bank statements/utility bills/paychecks used for lending applications, know your customer (KYC) regulations, and other purposes worldwide are tampered with; and 15% of company registration certificates submitted worldwide when opening bank accounts are fakes. Money laundering is rife too, with the UN estimating that between 2% and 5% of global GDP is laundered each year. On top of that, new threats are evolving. The financial industry needs a new approach to tackling financial crime, particularly in the face of automated AI-driven attacks which can generate new fraudulent identities at scale for fraud and money-laundering purposes.

Resistant AI’s state-of-the-art machine learning techniques effectively protect financial services firms from these growing threats, outsmart criminals’ use of AI, and adapt as their methods evolve. The company's solutions look for anomalies in documents, transactions, and behaviors to provide a 360 degree view of each customer which can up to double the amount of threats detected.

The company’s solutions are already protecting a number of banks and fintech companies across the customer life cycle. Customers include Dun & Bradstreet, Payoneer, Habito, Planet42, and ComplyAdvantage; and Resistant AI now has over 80 team members working across offices in Prague, London, Brussels, and New York.

This funding follows a very successful 2022 where the customer base more than doubled, ARR increased 6x, monthly usage increased 4x YoY, and the products were recognized by multiple awards, including winning the ACAMS Digital Crime Fighter of the Year awards twice in a row, winning The Europas Awards, and being listed in the AI Fintech 100 for the third year in a row.

Martin Rehak, CEO and Founder of Resistant AI said, “The transition from traditional finance to fintech has brought creativity and opportunities for customers, but there has been an accompanying rise in criminals exploiting these new services. The old methods of fighting financial crime cannot keep up and Resistant AI’s unique application of machine learning successfully tackles these ever-changing threats.” 

Rehak continued, “With this investment from Notion Capital we are able to build on this success and bring our solution to more institutions in the face of these increasingly pernicious threats. We are excited to be working with Notion Capital, particularly because of their expertise and track record in successfully growing computer security companies.”

Notion Capital founders are notable for their success with MessageLabs, the world’s first software-as-a-service (SaaS) computer security solution, which was acquired by Symantec in 2008 for $700 million—the biggest SaaS exit in Europe at the time. 

Kamil Mieczakowski, Principal at Notion Capital said, “Security and fintech are two of the largest areas of focus for Notion and we love how the Resistant AI proposition ties them together. Synthetic identity fraud has been named the fastest growing financial crime in the US, with $6 billion in total losses to the banking sector in 2021 alone, and the Resistant AI product is the only comprehensive solution out there that moves as fast as the fraudsters do. We’re excited to be working with them so they can meet the growing demand for their solution.”

Resistant AI provides new approaches to tackling financial crime by augmenting existing risk tech stacks to enhance the effectiveness of risk and compliance teams. These include:

• Document Forensics, which can analyze bank statements, utility bills, payslips, and other digital KYC documents in seconds for signs of forgery or fraud, capturing up to 32% new fraud events at onboarding.
• Transaction Forensics, which overlays existing rules-based AML transaction monitoring systems to provide 5x increases in fincrime investigation productivity through alert prioritization, new risk discovery, and a pre-transaction monitoring FRAML capability that can help combat APP Fraud.
• Identity Forensics, which takes in outputs from various data sources across an organization, including customer PII, behaviors, digital footprints, and the outputs of other systems.

About Notion Capital:

Notion is a venture capital firm focused on high-potential businesses in the Cloud Computing and Software-as-as-Service (SaaS) markets. The Notion team has unique expertise and experience in the Cloud Computing market having founded, built and exited two highly successful businesses in the space - Star and MessageLabs. Companies within Notion’s portfolio include Adbrain, Currency Cloud, Duedil, IOCS, MOVE Guides, NewVoiceMedia, and Tradeshift. For more information go to: notion.vc