Sphinx announced it has raised a $7.1 million seed round to scale what it describes as a browser native, agentic compliance workforce for financial institutions, positioning the product as a last compliance hire that can take on day-to-day operational work across anti-money laundering, know your customer, and know your business processes. The round was led by Cherry Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Deel Ventures, and Singularity Capital. Sphinx said the new capital will be used to expand the deployment of its compliance agents, as banks and fintechs seek to manage rising volumes of fraud and regulatory workload without continually adding headcount.
Sphinx is pitching its approach as distinct from traditional regtech software, arguing that institutions do not need another system or dashboard. Instead, the company said its agents work directly inside the tools compliance teams already rely on, including case management platforms, third-party portals, PDFs, email, and internal dashboards. In that environment, Sphinx said its agents can review alerts, conduct AML and KYB checks, gather supporting research, draft requests for information, and capture reasoning in a full audit trail intended to be regulator-ready.
The company emphasized the speed of implementation as part of its go-to-market thesis, stating that customers can go live in days without integrations or system replacements. That positioning aims to address one of the most common friction points in compliance modernization: tool adoption is often slowed by engineering requirements, lengthy procurement, and organizational resistance to replacing established workflows.
Sphinx also highlighted global applicability as a core benefit of its browser native architecture. The company said this design has enabled it to adapt to different workflows and regulatory requirements across more than a dozen regions since launch. It said its customers include banks, public companies, and fast-growing fintechs using the platform to eliminate manual review work, reduce backlogs, and scale compliance operations without adding analysts.
In describing traction, Sphinx said its agents have handled millions of alerts and hundreds of thousands of cases in production, and that the company can clear months-long backlogs in days. Sphinx also cited customer-reported outcomes, including lower manual review rates, faster onboarding, and reduced exposure to compliance errors and fines. For example, the company said Equals Money achieved a 94% reduction in false positives while increasing true positives, and that several institutions are now operating internationally without expanding compliance headcount, cutting operational costs by up to 4x.
The company is framing the opportunity against what it described as more than $200 billion spent each year on compliance teams and outsourced review houses. Sphinx’s message is that the bottleneck is not a lack of dashboards, but the volume of operational work required to connect systems that were never designed to work together, and that software should do more of that work end-to-end.
The company was founded by Alexandre Berkovic and Chrisjan Wüst, who previously worked together and are building their second company after a prior exit. Sphinx said Wüst built AML and onboarding infrastructure for more than 15 million users as the first employee at RelyComply, while Berkovic specialized in AI research at Imperial and MIT. The company said its early team includes operators, PhDs, and former compliance officers from global banks, aligning with its positioning that automated compliance must be explainable and auditable by design.
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, 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, Cherry Ventures
