Why we invested: AiPrise

Today we’re thrilled to support AiPrise in their Series Seed fundraise alongside Y Combinator, Okta Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, and Twenty Two Ventures as they build a global KYC platform for the financial services industry. 

We’re excited about AiPrise because as former founders, we’ve experienced the friction first-hand of expanding financial services into new, international markets.

The KYC market is fragmented. In most cases, KYC vendors operate in one geographic market, and often their data sets are best suited for a specific customer segment. As fintechs expand into new geographies, they spend time researching KYC vendors in each market and assessing whether they have an appropriate data set for their customer base, or whether they integrate with as many vendors as possible to derive optimal coverage. In short, they spend time on non-proprietary infrastructure instead of focusing on their core product and market expansion. 

This problem rides on the back of an increasingly global fintech market. More companies are looking to expand regionally or globally, and/or service customers outside of their home market. These accounts require upfront KYC and continuous monitoring, as well as an ability to navigate global networks for financial crime prevention and money laundering. We’ve seen that if a company wants to onboard users globally, they can end up integrating with over 10 vendors to verify the identity of their user base. 

As the market complexity increases, it’s important to ensure that compliance processes are efficient, optimized, and standardized. AiPrise is laser-focused on these themes. They aim to take the global KYC integration process from a few months to a few hours. They help to significantly and efficiently improve the proper validation of identities through their KYC orchestration product, and can also help enable unique or institution-specific workflows, such as automated credit-checking and flexible, anti-fraud processes. 

Beyond everything else, at this stage, we invest in teams. They share a vision for solving the global challenges of compliance and fraud and bring the expertise to back it up. With deep security and product experience at Google and Meta, both Chaitanya Sarda and Rushabh Shah are “Restive” operators, building together a world-class team that will enable them to move fast and change global KYC. We’re thrilled to be a part of the journey.