Norway’s Strise Raises $10.8 Million to Expand AML Offering

Strise has raised $10.8 million to bring its anti-money laundering technology to new markets.

London-based venture capital firm Atomico, which led the Series A round, announced the funding for the Norwegian company on its website Wednesday (Sept. 6).

Strise plans to use the funds to bring its anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) services to the U.K., and to expand its customer base.

“While compliance teams often rely on static data, through continuous monitoring and entity matching, Strise provides comprehensive, real-time KYC and AML checks, and flags high-risk business changes or newly-sanctioned companies for both human review and automatically, depending on the company’s risk profile,” the announcement said.

“This is a game changer in the fight against money laundering, allowing compliance teams to stay on top of the changing data, regulations, and sanctions that can cause errors,” Atomico added.

The announcement noted that Strise will have the opportunity to further grow as the European Union’s Digital Services Act goes into effect, requiring large marketplaces such as Amazon to verify each seller, “meaning KYC will encompass everything from partners and suppliers to potential ESG policies of businesses.”

“If banks don’t adapt to AI, they risk falling behind. With crime and regulations becoming more complex, traditional methods aren’t enough,” said Marit Rødevand, CEO and co-founder of Strise, according to a report by EU Startups.

Her comments echoed those of Diameter Pay CEO and Co-founder David Lighton in an interview with PYMNTS earlier this year.

“It’s time for FinTechs to kind of grow up,” he said. “In [an] environment with higher regulatory scrutiny, we need to get really serious about compliance if we want to make it.”

Data shared in the 2023 PYMNTS playbook, “Digital Payments Technology: Investing in Payments Systems for the Digital Economy” shows that companies that continue to depend upon manual and reactive anti-fraud tools experience slower growth than those using automated solutions.

Additional intelligence in PYMNTS’ 2023 “B2B Payments Fraud Tracker” showed that 71% of businesses say they need additional digital fraud solutions.

“New applications of predictive AI are already helping firms enact cost-effective and increasingly non-manual decisioning processes around their compliance programs,” PYMNTS wrote. “These modern solutions sacrifice neither security nor convenience, while offering auditable processes that stand up to regulatory scrutiny.”