Q1 2026 has wrapped up! Time for our quarterly investment update. Explore the latest funding rounds and acquisitions in the world of fraud prevention, identity verification, and risk mitigation — a quarter marked by surging capital flowing into agentic AI, digital trust infrastructure, and next-generation compliance tooling.
Funding
Bretton AI
Bretton AI — formerly known as Greenlite AI — raised $75 million in a Series B round led by Sapphire Ventures, with continued participation from existing investors Greylock, Thomson Reuters Ventures, Canvas Ventures, and Y Combinator, plus new investor TIAA Ventures. The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2023 by CEO Will Lawrence, simultaneously announced its rebrand to Bretton AI — a name inspired by the Bretton Woods agreement that helped shape the modern financial system. The platform provides agentic AI for financial crime operations, automating KYC/KYB reviews, AML investigations, sanctions screening, and ongoing monitoring for regulated institutions. Bretton AI is trusted by OCC-, FDIC-, and Federal Reserve–regulated banks and fintechs representing over $1 trillion in combined market cap, including Robinhood, Mercury, Gusto, and Lead Bank. The new capital will support product expansion across additional financial crime domains, deeper regulatory engagement, and accelerated adoption by larger institutions.
IVIX
New York-based startup IVIX, which uses artificial intelligence to help governments and law enforcement agencies detect complex financial crimes, raised $60 million in a Series B funding round. The round was led by O.G. Venture Partners, with participation from Insight Partners, Citi Ventures, Team8, Disruptive AI, Cardumen Capital, and Cerca Partners. This brings IVIX’s total funding since its founding in 2020 to approximately $85 million. The company’s software leverages large-language models, graph analytics, and publicly available data to uncover illicit offshore assets, layered money-laundering schemes, cryptocurrency networks, and other forms of financial fraud that traditional investigative methods struggle to detect.
IDfy
Mumbai-based identity verification and regtech platform IDfy secured $52 million (₹476 crore) in a Series F round led by Neo Asset Management, with participation from existing backers Blume Ventures, Analog Capital, Elev8 Venture Partners, IndiaMART, and Kae Capital. Founded in 2011, IDfy processes around 2 million verifications per day across 500+ enterprise clients spanning banking, fintech, ride-sharing, and e-commerce in seven countries. The company’s flagship offering, TrustStack, is a unified platform covering digital onboarding, KYC/KYB compliance, fraud detection, and privacy governance. The fresh capital will support international expansion, strategic acquisitions, and further innovation across its trust and privacy stack — including positioning the company as IPO-ready in India’s fast-growing regtech market.
Outtake AI
Outtake, a New York-based digital trust platform, raised $40 million in a Series B led by ICONIQ Growth, with participation from CRV, S32, and a star-studded roster of angel investors including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens, and former OpenAI VP Bob McGrew. Founded in 2023 by former Palantir engineer Alex Dhillon, Outtake automates the detection and takedown of digital identity threats — including impersonation accounts, lookalike domains, rogue apps, and fraudulent ads — using autonomous AI agents that scan the open web, social platforms, app stores, and ad networks in real time. The company scanned 20 million potential cyberattacks in 2025 alone and counts OpenAI, Pershing Square, AppLovin, and federal agencies among its customers. Annual recurring revenue grew 6x year-over-year ahead of the raise.
Memcyco
Israeli cybersecurity firm Memcyco raised $37 million in a Series A funding round. The company specializes in protecting businesses and their customers from brand impersonation and website spoofing attacks — a growing vector for phishing and account fraud in an era where AI dramatically lowers the cost of producing convincing fake sites and digital assets.
Duna
Duna, an identity fintech founded by two Stripe alumni, announced a €30 million Series A led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, with participation from existing investors Index Ventures and Puzzle Ventures, plus Snowflake Chairman Frank Slootman. Based in Germany and the Netherlands, the company was co-founded in 2023 by Duco van Lanschot (formerly head of Benelux and DACH at Stripe) and David Schreiber (formerly running Stripe’s largest global business unit). Duna’s mission is to build global trust infrastructure by providing a digital passport for every business — an AI-native KYB platform for regulated companies including large banks, fintechs, and financial institutions. The latest raise brings Duna’s total funding to over €40 million, and the company counts Plaid among its early customers. CapitalG described Duna as building “the internet’s missing one-click identity network,” drawing a parallel to Stripe’s role in democratizing payments.
Variance
Variance raised $21 million in a funding round aimed at scaling its fraud and risk intelligence platform. The investment reflects continued investor appetite for data-driven compliance and transaction risk tooling as financial institutions look to address increasingly sophisticated fraud vectors across their customer bases.
Bits
Swedish AML fintech Bits raised €12 million in a Series A funding round to unify and modernize anti-money laundering compliance for European fintechs. The company’s platform helps regulated businesses streamline AML workflows, improving efficiency and regulatory coverage across the fragmented European compliance landscape.
Cleafy
Italian cybersecurity and fraud prevention firm Cleafy secured €12 million in a Series B round. The company specializes in real-time detection and prevention of online banking fraud, helping financial institutions identify and respond to sophisticated attack patterns targeting digital channels. The funding will support product development and international expansion.
Sphinx
Sphinx raised $7.1 million in a seed/early-stage round to build what it describes as “every financial institution’s last compliance hire” — an AI-powered platform designed to automate the compliance function end-to-end. The company is positioning itself as a scalable alternative to growing compliance headcount, targeting the significant operational burden financial institutions face in meeting AML and regulatory obligations.
Sinpex
German regtech startup Sinpex closed a €4 million financing round to scale its AML compliance and transaction monitoring solutions. Sinpex focuses on helping financial institutions and payment providers automate KYC and AML workflows, reducing manual overhead while maintaining regulatory alignment in European markets.
Arva AI
Arva AI secured $3 million in a seed funding round backed by Google’s AI fund, underlining strong strategic interest from Big Tech in the compliance automation space. The company builds AI-powered tools to streamline risk and compliance workflows, with a focus on making regulatory processes faster and more defensible for regulated financial services businesses.
Orca Fraud
South African fraud prevention startup Orca Fraud raised $2.35 million in a seed funding round to strengthen its real-time fraud detection capabilities and expand its presence across global markets. The company is building solutions tailored to the specific fraud patterns and financial infrastructure challenges of emerging markets, starting from Africa and scaling internationally.
Acquisitions
Global Payments / ChargebackHelp / DisputeHelp
Global Payments Inc., a leading worldwide provider of payment technology and software solutions, has completed the acquisition of both ChargebackHelp and DisputeHelp, two specialized platforms in the chargeback management and payments dispute space. ChargebackHelp provides industry-leading chargeback management solutions that help merchants eliminate chargebacks and recover lost revenue through a single integrated platform. DisputeHelp — its sister platform — offers a card-agnostic, all-in-one dispute automation solution, integrating tools such as Verifi Order Insight, Ethoca Consumer Clarity, Rapid Dispute Resolution (RDR), and CDRN alerts into a unified merchant-facing portal. The acquisition positions Global Payments to offer a more comprehensive dispute and fraud prevention stack to its merchant clients, particularly as Visa’s new VAMP (Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program) thresholds tighten acquirer compliance requirements significantly in 2026.
Veriff / Vespia
Estonian identity verification unicorn Veriff has acquired Vespia, a fellow Estonia-based Know Your Business (KYB) technology provider, in a strategic move to expand from pure identity verification toward a broader, single-vendor trust platform. Vespia was co-founded in 2021 by Julia Ront — notably Veriff’s second-ever employee — who left to build the company before this full-circle return. Vespia’s platform covers business registry data across 300+ jurisdictions, shareholder and UBO verification for complex ownership structures, customizable onboarding workflows based on risk profiles, and ongoing post-onboarding monitoring. The Vespia team will join Veriff, with KYB capabilities available via a Limited Access Program in Q1 2026 and commercially across the Veriff platform by mid-2026. The deal reflects a clear market trend: regulated businesses increasingly want a single trusted partner for both KYC and KYB, rather than managing multiple compliance vendors. Veriff, which surpassed $100 million in annual revenue in 2025, frames this acquisition as a foundational step toward becoming the definitive unified trust platform for the digital economy.
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