Today we’re announcing our $7.1M seed round, led by Cherry Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Deel Ventures, and Singularity Capital.
This funding allows us to scale our AI agents built for compliance teams at banks, fintechs, and public companies, accelerating our mission to become every financial institution's last compliance hire.
Compliance Is Not a Software Problem
Financial institutions spend more than $200B each year on compliance labor.
Most of that spend doesn’t go toward better decisions.
It goes toward analysts acting as human glue between systems that were never designed to work together – toggling between case tools, portals, PDFs, emails, sanctions databases, and internal dashboards.
Traditional RegTech added dashboards and outsourcing added headcount. Neither removed the work. Because compliance was never a software problem.
It's an execution problem.
How Sphinx Works: A New Operating Model for Compliance
Financial crime operations are high-volume, unstructured, and distributed across dozens of systems. There are case management tools, sanctions databases, corporate registries, PDFs, internal dashboards, and third-party portals. No single system can execute the workflow end-to-end. So historically, scaling meant one thing: more people.
Our AI agents perform the work of a compliance analyst directly inside the systems teams already use. They:
- review alerts and investigations
- conduct AML, KYC, and KYB checks
- gather supporting research and documentation
- draft RFIs and case narratives
- produce regulator-ready audit trails by default
Because the agents are browser-native, they operate directly within these environments — navigating interfaces, extracting and reconciling data, and executing investigative steps in sequence. No APIs. No data exports. They work at the workflow layer, interacting with legacy tools, structured systems, and unstructured sources in real time.
Each action is logged, reproducible, and tied to a defensible decision trail.
They don't replace judgment. They remove the mechanical execution that prevents judgment from scaling.
No integrations, no rip-and-replace, no new interface to learn — teams go live in days.
Our Results: Immediate, Measurable Impact
Our agents are live across 8 countries and operate in production with banks, fintechs, crypto platforms, and public companies, including U.S. institutions regulated by the OCC, FDIC, and Federal Reserve. In production, Sphinx agents have processed millions of alerts and hundreds of thousands of cases.
Sphinx is built to deliver operational results within days, not quarters. Because agents work directly inside existing workflows, teams can eliminate backlogs and restore velocity almost immediately.
In practice, customers have:
- cleared months-long backlogs in days
- reduced onboarding and investigation cycle times from days to minutes
- materially lowered exposure to compliance errors and missed risk
- achieved up to 94% reduction in false positives while improving true positive detection
- reduced compliance operating costs by up to 4x
Several teams now support international expansion and increased alert volumes without increasing compliance headcount.
Built for Trust, Auditability, and Control
Automation in compliance must be explainable, defensible, and aligned with regulatory expectations. That's why Sphinx operates through a proprietary Interpretable Agentic Framework designed so that every decision can be reviewed, reproduced, and trusted.
Agents follow policy-aware reasoning, document their investigative steps, and produce a complete audit trail by default. This ensures every decision is defensible during audits, regulatory reviews, and model risk governance processes.
Human oversight remains integral:
- analysts review edge cases and high-risk decisions
- feedback loops continuously refine agent behavior
- decision logic evolves based on expert review and QA
- every action is logged for model governance and regulator review
At Sphinx, we have an internal compliance team that works alongside customers as forward-deployed solutions architects. They operate as an extension of the compliance function, not an external vendor — mapping SOPs, validating decision logic, tuning workflows, reviewing edge cases, and ensuring deployments align with regulatory expectations and operational realities from day one.
This approach allows institutions to move faster without sacrificing control, combining machine execution with human judgment, and ensuring automation strengthens compliance rather than introducing new risk.
What’s Next For Us
The pressure on compliance teams isn’t slowing down. Alert volumes are rising, regulatory expectations are tightening, and institutions are expanding across jurisdictions faster than their operations can keep up.
Our focus is simple: scale the product, the team, and the company to meet the operational reality compliance teams face every day.
Compliance should not be a bottleneck to growth, or a tradeoff between speed and safety. It should function as core operational infrastructure.
We’re grateful to the customers who trusted us early, the team building this every day, and the partners and investors supporting the journey.
If you’re rethinking how compliance gets done, we’d love to talk.
If you want to help build the operational layer for global trust, we’re hiring.
This is just the beginning.
– Alex & Chris