Accend, an AI-driven onboarding and risk assessment startup for B2B fintechs, has raised $3.2 million in seed funding, the company tells Axios exclusively.
Why it's the BFD: The high-profile collapse of Banking as a Service startup Synapse placed fintech and partner bank compliance under increased scrutiny.
Yes, but: Conducting due diligence while onboarding a business onto a fintech or banking platform is complex, repetitive and prone to human error.
How it works: Accend automates the process of researching a business's product, services and beneficial owners, among other things, speeding up business onboarding.
- It provides insights into industry risks using a customizable AI model trained and tailored to a client's specific risk appetite.
- The process enables fintechs to meet partner bank and regulator requirements with better operational efficiency and improved compliance capabilities.
Context: Founders Pranjal Daga and Yutong Pei met at Brex, where they led product and engineering on the company's fraud-risk team.
- A third co-founder, Joseph Zhou, was formerly CFO at a mobile gaming startup.
- "At Brex, we saw such an inherent need for increasing quality and efficiency in compliance and risk operations and an opportunity to do so with AI," Daga says.
Zoom in: Adverb Ventures led the round, which included participation from Y Combinator, General Catalyst and 645 Ventures.
- Early customers include Slope, Pleo, Rho and Pliant.
