Sentinels, the Dutch startup behind an AI-powered transaction monitoring system, has raised EUR5.7 million in a seed funding round.
Inkef Capital led the round, which was joined by several high-profile angels, including members of the early Adyen team.
Sentinels was launched 18 months ago by Joost van Houten and is a spin-out from Slimmer AI, a European B2B AI venture studio.
The startup is targeting fintechs and already counts online payments unicorn Mollie, as well as Terrapay, Online Payment Platform, Ginger Payments and ManoBank among its roster of clients.
The firm analyses internal data siloes and augments them with external sources - such as adverse media, sanctions lists and merchant websites - to create a rich context.
Expert logic, machine learning models and graph networks then promise to sieve out only on the truly suspicious cases, and a smart workflow automates repetitive tasks. The entire compliance process is simplified to one API.
The new funding will be used to build out the product and expand into the UK and beyond Europe, to North America, Latin America and Apac.
Says van Houten: "Our aim is to help financial institutions keep track of who their customers really are and how they behave - not only to understand risks, but also to serve them better.