FinTech News
AI-Powered Compliance Platform Sedric Raises $18.5 Million
A company that leverages AI to help financial institutions manage compliance issues has closed a new round of funding.
About the round:
Sedric has announced that it raised $18.5 million in its latest round. The Series A was led by Foundation Capital with Amex Ventures also participating. To date, the company has now raised a total of $22 million including a 2021 seed round. With the new funds, Sedric says it intends to grow its AI lab as well as expand its go-to-market teams globally.
About Sedric:
Sedric offers financial institutions what it calls a “compliance co-pilot.” This tool is powered by AI technology, which the company says can be used to convert policies into processes. Then, the service can use automation for detection and mitigation as well as reporting. In addition to including a library of regulations, the service can be trained on institutions’ specific policies.
According to Sedric’s site, clients that use the company’s solutions have seen an 80% decrease in non-compliant conduct as well as an increase in productivity of up to 50%. As for Sedric itself, it says that it has seen revenue increase fivefold in the past 12 months, with its customer base growing in both the United States and Europe.
What they’re saying:
Discussing the purpose of Sedric and its tools, the company’s CEO and co-founder Nir Laznik said, “For financial institutions, compliance and growth can be seen as two competing priorities. With our compliance LLM, we turn risk into a growth opportunity.” Laznik added, “Enterprises now have an opportunity to implement a proven, bank-ready solution that is successfully operational and already widely adopted across the financial services industry.”
Meanwhile, speaking on Foundation Capital’s investment in Sedric, General Partner Charles Moldow stated, “Sedric’s AI compliance platform fills a critical industry need as regulatory requirements become more stringent and complex. Nir, Eyal [Peleg, co-founder and CTO], and the Sedric team have developed a forward-looking solution that is 100 times more effective, faster, and efficient compared to traditional methods. This is a rare ‘better-faster-cheaper’ compliance solution for financial institutions.”
My thoughts:
On the one hand, using AI to manage repetitive and tedious tasks makes a lot of sense, so it’s understandable why institutions might want to pass off some of that work to a service like Sedric. At the same time, the skeptic in me wonders whether handing off tasks related to something as important as compliance to AI is really the smartest idea. Granted, since Sedric’s service is so specific, there’s likely less of a chance that their tools will display the type of “hallucinations” we’ve seen with broader AI tools.
Setting aside my personal feelings, it’s clear that Sedric has impressed some major players as they’ve managed to get Foundational Capital and Amex on board. To me, that indicates that the FinTech is in for much larger funding rounds and success going forward.