Know you customer company kompany has raised close to €6m almost a year to the day after its most recent round.
kompany last raised money back in August 2019.
The new round is the startup’s biggest to date and brings the total injected into the venture to €14m.
It will use the new funding to accelerate growth and expand its new product lines, the AI-based shareholder analysis tool UBO discovery and the DLT-based audit-trail solution KYC onchain.
“Our vision is to enable the five-second cross-border payment with full AML and KYB compliance embedded”, sais Russell Perry, CEO and founder of kompany. “If you have ever wondered why an international bank transfer can take hours or frequently even days to post – it is directly linked to regulatory requirements and our platform replaces those legacy practices.”
Fairway Global Investment led the round, together with Global Brain, a major Japan-based venture capital firm. Existing shareholders, including the European Super Angels Club and the kompany management team also participated in this round.
“kompany’s business KYC services have been shown to bring significant efficiency gains for their clients and are particularly relevant to our investments in the payments sector and also our corporate partners,” said Naoki Kamimaeda, partner at Global Brain. “We look forward to leveraging this new partnership with kompany to support our other portfolio companies and partners.”
Perry added, “The smart money understands that RegTech is about turning the burden of compliance into a competitive advantage by enabling customers to drastically reduce client onboarding times by 90% and by completely digitizing the process and customer experience.”
The round comes after a year in which the company has doubled its team in order to keep abreast of the EU’s extensive anti-money laundering regulations.
It also noted that the Covid-19 pandemic has also upped the demand for its services as it has inadvertently caused a market rush to rapidly digitise and automate formerly manual compliance processes.
“The current market and regulatory situation warrant a far more automated, audit-proof business verification with an exponentially lower margin of error, as compliance risks have never been higher, and clients increasingly move to seamless digital services,” said Johanna Konrad, COO of kompany.
John Vorrias, chief investment officer at Fairway Global Investment, added, “RegTech generally, and kompany specifically has the potential to be a game-changer in terms of the broad use-case applications across multiple industries and segments. And kompany operates the only real-time proprietary global register network that connects to primary source commercial registers and financial & tax authorities in over 200 countries and jurisdictions.”
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