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Open source risk decisioning startup Ballerine raises $5 million in seed financing

Source: Ballerine

Ballerine, an open-source risk decisioning platform, has raised $5 Million in a seed funding round led by Team8. The company provides an open-source platform that integrates global data sources, along with the necessary tools to automate and enhance decision-making processes for tasks such as onboarding (KYB), underwriting, and transaction monitoring.

Ballerine caters to any business handling financial transactions subjected to KYB, KYC, and anti-money laundering regulations, including most financial institutions, FinTechs, e-commerce, marketplaces, and other businesses. Ballerine is experiencing rapid growth and traction, its open-source GitHub repository has attracted over 1500 developers worldwide, with dozens of fintech companies using its code in production.

The company was founded by an expert team of developers from the digital banking space with extensive experience building in-house risk infrastructure, and a first-hand understanding of the many challenges associated with developing and maintaining risk systems internally. The founding team, Noam Izhaki (CEO), Nitzan Guy (CPO), and Alon Peretz (CTO), launched Ballerine to solve the pain points they encountered using a developer-first, open-source and modular approach.

Traditionally, verifying, underwriting and monitoring businesses is a complex task. It involves extensive data pulling from multiple sources, documentation, and policy updates due to changes in regulations, threats, and best practices. This complexity increases exponentially as companies expand to new geographies or add new products and business lines. Ballerine simplifies this task, enabling developers to fully customize their risk assessment workflow through a marketplace of point solutions. Data sources can be accessed via a single commercial agreement with Ballerine or through commercialization directly with data vendors. These sources include but are not limited to: company registries, sanctions, websites/social, credit agencies, adverse media, PEP databases, UBO registries and Open-Banking.

“The financial industry desperately needs infrastructure to support its ongoing digital transformation, infrastructure that empowers institutions to automatically access and analyze data throughout the customer journey,” said Noam Izhaki, the CEO and Co-Founder of Ballerine, “Ballerine offers exactly that - it leverages dispersed data, simplifies privacy management, and empowers companies to continually enhance their risk-decisioning processes while maintaining control and flexibility.”

Ballerine’s open-source core gives developers and risk managers control over the infrastructure with a single integration and allows customization to address specific needs around customer experience, risk exposures, audiences, and geographies. Ballerine’s open-source platform is the next-gen infrastructure for risk and identity decisioning as it offers significantly more flexibility for global financial services and large institutions, catering to many more use cases and leaving more room for customers to extend and customize the platform.

“Ballerine has a real opportunity to transform the way any business handling financial transactions manages risk.” said Hadar Siterman Norris, Partner at Team8. “This funding will help Ballerine create the first open-source and developer-centric compliance infrastructure, which is sure to propel Ballerine to even greater heights. We are excited to be part of their journey.”

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