Sphinx, a compliance automation platform that builds browser-native agents for financial institutions, announced it has raised $7.1 million in seed funding to expand its agent workforce and support growing demand from banks and fintechs managing anti-money laundering and onboarding operations. The round was led by Cherry Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Deel Ventures, and Singularity Capital.
The company said the new capital will be used to scale its compliance agents as institutions increasingly rely on automation for core AML, KYC, and KYB workflows.
Based in San Francisco, Sphinx is positioning itself as an intelligence layer for global trust, aiming to modernize how institutions handle compliance in an era of rising fraud and regulatory complexity. Rather than requiring teams to adopt new software platforms, Sphinx’s agents operate directly within the tools institutions already use, including case management systems, third-party portals, PDFs, email, and internal dashboards.
The company says its agents can review alerts, conduct AML and KYB checks, gather supporting research, draft requests for information, and generate regulator-ready audit trails that document each decision. Teams typically go live within days, without integrations or system replacements.
In production environments, Sphinx agents have handled millions of alerts and hundreds of thousands of cases, clearing months-long backlogs in days. The company reports that customers have reduced operational costs by up to 4x, cut manual review workloads, and accelerated onboarding. Equals Money, for example, reported a 94% reduction in false positives while increasing true positive detection. Several institutions are also using Sphinx to expand internationally without increasing compliance headcount.
Sphinx estimates that more than $200 billion is spent annually on compliance teams and outsourced review firms to handle tasks legacy software was not designed to handle. The company’s approach focuses on completing the work itself rather than adding another dashboard or reporting layer.
The company was founded by Alexandre Berkovic and Chrisjan Wüst. Wüst previously built AML and onboarding infrastructure serving more than 15 million users as the first employee at RelyComply. Berkovic specialized in AI research at Imperial and MIT. The founders previously exited a prior company together. The broader Sphinx team includes former compliance officers, PhDs, and operators from global banks.
KEY QUOTES
“Compliance today is mostly human glue between systems that were never designed to work together. Sphinx takes on that work directly so analysts can focus on the judgment calls — and institutions finally get a complete, defensible record of how every decision was made.”
Alexandre Berkovic, Co-Founder and CEO of Sphinx
“Sphinx isn’t just a software, it’s critical operational infrastructure that meets teams where they are: in their systems, procedures, and day-to-day reality. Very few products can function inside that level of complexity. That’s what’s driving such rapid adoption across banks and fintechs.”
Filip Dames, Founding Partner at Cherry Ventures
