Award-winning regulatory technology (RegTech) platform provider, kompany, today announced in a company press release that it had received a fresh investment of over €5.5m making it the RegTech platform provider’s largest single investment round to date.
kompany wrote that it will use the new funding to accelerate its growth and expand its suite of products which includes the AI-based shareholder analysis tool UBO discovery® and the DLT-based audit-trail solution KYC onchain.
Russell E. Perry, Founder and CEO of kompany commented on what customers implementing RegTech capabilities can expect to achieve by saying: “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 digitising the process and customer experience.”
COVID-19 has brought increased attention to the possibilities of what automation and AI-enabled technologies can bring to a company both for the saved costs and increasing the efficiency of business operations and internal processes.
RegTech is used within the finance sector to such an extent its considered to be a technology that falls under FinTech, however, it’s starting to get use in other industries. Bloomberg claimed in August 2019 that RegTech could have a market size worth $55.28bn with a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 52.8%.
Perry wrote on what the companies vision was for the RegTech platform provider by saying: “Our vision is to enable the 5 second cross-border payment with full AML and KYB compliance embedded. 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.”
Investors have spotted the opportunity with automation capabilities and are taking positions within companies that have shown opportunities to reduce a companies cost, save its teams time spent on tasks that can be automated, and increase the value it can give customers.
Companies and industries are increasingly onboarding some form of automation into its armoury with examples including AI-enabled negotiation platform Pactum securing $3m in financing, real-time communication company acquire raising $6.4m in a Series A funding round, and AI-driven commercial insurance platform Planck raising $16m.
The investment was led by Fairway Global Investment and Global Brain with existing shareholder European Super Angels Club taking part as well as the kompany management team also participating.
Naoki Kamimaeda, Partner at Global Brain commented on what led them to invest with the RegTech provider by saying: “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. We look forward to leveraging this new partnership with kompany to support our other portfolio companies and partners”.
Vienna-based kompany was founded in 2012 and has since grown to a team of 15 with offices in London, New York, and Singapore and claiming to currently serve over 50,000 customers across 100 countries.
The RegTech platform provider wrote that it’s doubled its team size in the past year with the aim of this growth to outpace the new regulatory realities of highly enforced Anti-Money Laundering regulation in Europe (AMLD 4&5) and the pending US AML regulation.
Johanna Konrad, COO of kompany commented on the current RegTech market by saying: “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.”
The RegTech platform provider has claimed that as a result of the above, it has seen the value of its sales pipeline increase to an eight-figure number in the last twelve months alone.
kompany has won a number of awards that have global recognition that include RegTech 100, CB Insights Top 60 RegTech Europe, winner of Legal Tech Hub Vienna, and MasterCard Start Path 2018 showing that the RegTech platform provider is trusted and offers a valuable service and platform.
John Vorrias, Chief Investment Officer at Fairway Global Investment gave a summary for the company taking a position in the RegTech platform provider by saying: “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.”
kompany explained that the fresh investment will directly supports its further development of two key technologies that include the AI-based instant shareholder discovery and the fusion of Digital Identity with Business KYC (KYB) for cross-border payments.
