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Early in his career, Will Lawrence worked on the product team at Facebook focused on anti-money laundering. The former PayPal president David Marcus had been brought in to help kickstart the payments initiatives company-wide, including through WhatsApp launches in India and Brazil. But Lawrence quickly learned that the main roadblock was the decidedly unsexy compliance work of making sure the product was adhering to local \u201cknow your customer\u201d provisions and fraud prevention.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After working on the compliance team at the stablecoin infrastructure company Paxos, Lawrence decided to ride the generative AI wave and enter one of the first Y Combinator batches after the launch of ChatGPT. His thesis was that anti-money laundering and know-your-customer compliance operations would be one of the breakout use cases for applying AI to financial services. Lawrence\u2019s bet turned out to be prescient. Less than three years later, his startup Bretton AI (previously called Greenlite) is announcing its $75 million Series B funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from his seed and Series A backer Greylock, along with Thomson Reuters Ventures and Canvas Ventures.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lawrence says that the world of financial monitoring has two layers. The first is risk reduction, which can be solved with more rudimentary machine learning. In other words, if a user starts sending $50 million a day, a system should easily pick up that it requires further investigation. The second layer, risk remediation, is trickier. That\u2019s where the complex investigation takes place to figure out the background of the parties involved in suspicious transactions and whether they violate a company\u2019s internal risk policies\u2014and where Bretton is focused.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As AI increasingly commoditizes software (and potentially makes untold numbers of SaaS startups and public companies obsolete), Sapphire managing director Rajeev Dham said that the sensitivity of a product like Bretton, which needs to sell into the trust infrastructure of massive financial institutions, \u201cfeels more protected.\u201d Seth Rosenberg, general partner at Greylock, added that rather than using Anthropic to develop their own applications, a bank like JPMorgan could benefit from having a third-party. \u201cWhen compliance businesses reach scale, sometimes they can get smarter because they\u2019re seeing data across the entire industry,\u201d he said. For now, Bretton has focused on financial services companies as its customers, ranging from fintech startups like Mercury, Ramp, and Robinhood, as well as a number of community and regional banks including the tech-friendly Lead Bank.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Financial services have long been a thorny arena for vertical AI companies. An AI system going wonky in software development or design might lead to a bug. The stakes are higher in finance, but the difficulty is part of the mission.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe easy thing is to go sell marketing AI,\u201d Lawrence joked. \u201cThe hard thing is to solve things that really matter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Leo Schwartz Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.<\/p>\n Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today\u2019s newsletter.<\/em> Subscribe here.<\/p>\n – <\/span>tem<\/b>, a London, U.K.-based AI-native energy transaction platform, raised $75 million in Series B funding. <\/span>Lightspeed<\/b> led the round and was joined by <\/span>Hitachi<\/b> Ventures<\/b>, <\/span>Voyager<\/b> Ventures<\/b>, <\/span>Schroders<\/b> Capital<\/b>, and <\/span>Allianz<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n – <\/span>Neara<\/b>, a Sydney, Australia-based digital twin modeling platform for critical infrastructure, raised $60 million in Series D funding. <\/span>TCV<\/b> led the round and was joined by <\/span>Partners<\/b> Group<\/b>, <\/span>EQT<\/b>, <\/span>Square<\/b> Peg<\/b> Capital<\/b>, and <\/span>Skip<\/b> Capital<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n – <\/span>Aerska<\/b>, a Dublin, Ireland-based developer of RNA medicines for central nervous system diseases, raised $39 million in Series A funding. <\/span>EQT<\/b> Dementia<\/b> Fund<\/b> and <\/span>age1<\/b> led the round and was joined by <\/span>Iaso<\/b> Ventures<\/b> and existing investors.<\/span><\/p>\n – <\/span>Modveon<\/b>, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based developer of an operating system designed to modernize how governments and citizens communicate with each other, raised $10 million in funding from <\/span>Coinbase<\/b> Ventures<\/b>, <\/span>Firebolt<\/b> Ventures<\/b>, <\/span>Humla<\/b> Ventures<\/b>, <\/span>Strategic Cyber Ventures<\/b>, and others.<\/span><\/p>\n – <\/span>Allonic<\/b>, a Budapest, Hungary-based designer and producer of robotics hardware, raised $7.2 million in pre-seed funding. <\/span>Visionaries<\/b> Club<\/b> led the round and was joined by <\/span>Day One Capital<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n – <\/span>Dono<\/b>, a West Palm Beach, Fla.-based AI-powered property records platform, raised $6.5 million in seed funding. <\/span>Link<\/b> Ventures<\/b> led the round and was joined by <\/span>lool VC<\/b> and <\/span>Alumni<\/b> Ventures<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n – <\/span>Mozart<\/b> AI<\/b>, a London, U.K.-based developer of AI-powered music creation tools, raised $6 million in seed funding. <\/span>Balderton<\/b> Capital<\/b> led the round.<\/span><\/p>\n – <\/span>ZeroDrift<\/b>, a New York City-based compliance enforcement platform, raised $2 million in pre-seed funding. <\/span>a16z<\/b> led the round.<\/span><\/p>\n – <\/span>TPG<\/b> agreed to acquire a majority stake in <\/span>Sabre<\/b> Industries<\/b>, an Alvarado, Texas-based provider of critical infrastructure for power utilities, data center, and telecom. Financial terms were not disclosed.<\/span><\/p>\n – <\/span>NatWest<\/b> Group<\/b> acquired<\/span> Evelyn<\/b> Partners<\/b>, a London, U.K.-based wealth management company, from <\/span>Permira<\/b> and <\/span>Warburg<\/b> Pincus<\/b> for \u00a32.7 billion ($3.7 billion).<\/span><\/p>\n – <\/span>Haveli<\/b> Investments<\/b> agreed to acquire <\/span>Budge<\/b> Studios<\/b>, a Montreal, Canada-based children\u2019s entertainment company, from <\/span>General<\/b> Atlantic<\/b>. Financial terms were not disclosed.<\/span><\/p>\n – <\/span>Gemspring Capital<\/b>, a Westport, Conn.-based private equity firm, promoted <\/span>Aron<\/b> Grossman<\/b> and <\/span>Zubin<\/b> Malkani<\/b> as co-heads of investment.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Bretton #raises #million #combat #financial #crime<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Early in his career, Will Lawr… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20499,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[12495,7776,1018,121,913,1569,1175,1570,1571],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20498"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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