By swiftly and intelligently verifying parties and transactions, Mimiro‘s platform changes how companies assess who they’re doing business with – combatting financial crime and reducing laborious manual checks.
The London-based startup has now raised €26 million in a Series B round from investors to accelerate the expansion of its machine-learning platform to analyse the risk of financial crime. Index Ventures, the London and San Francisco-based venture capital firm, led the round, joined by existing investor Balderton Capital.
Founded in 2014, Mirimo (formerly ComplyAdvantage) already boasts 350 clients in 45 countries across the US, Europe and Asia, including major global banks.
“We exist because globalisation is intensifying the business problems of trust,” said Mimiro’s CEO and founder Charles Delingpole, who previously founded MarketInvoice. “To offset concerns, many businesses can be hyper-cautious and conservative, losing out on commercial opportunities – in some cases abandoning entire countries or industries.”
As the global economy becomes increasingly complex and interconnected, it’s now more vital – and also more difficult – than ever to get a clear picture of the entity on the other side of the table during a transaction or business relationship. Geopolitical instability, lengthening supply chains, increased migration and the growth of emerging markets all put pressure on companies to improve their standards for verifying the risk and legitimacy of counterparties and payments.
While financial crime and ‘know your customer’ rules are Mimiro’s near-term focus, the company is building a comprehensive global repository that provides an instant, accurate risk profile for every commercial entity and individual in the world.
In the post-9/11 environment, companies have been spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year to understand who they’re doing business with. Multiple scandals in which banks have been fined billions of dollars for facilitating illegal activity, point to the ongoing reputational and commercial dangers of getting things wrong.
Mimiro solves these problems by using deep learning and machine intelligence technology. The company’s self-improving algorithms scour millions of data sources daily, building a holistic snapshot of an entity’s risk in real-time, and spotting nuanced patterns across users and transactions that would elude a human assessor. The company also lets clients tailor the product to focus on parameters that are particularly relevant to them.
“Historically, financial crime tends to run ahead of the means of catching it; remedies have been reactive. Today, the problems are getting bigger, the risks and the penalties are more severe, and the old system can’t cope,” said Jan Hammer Partner at Index Ventures partner. “Mimiro has a completely new approach, giving companies the power to get a fast, sophisticated understanding of where their risks lie. We’ve been impressed by their traction with a wide range of customers, including their capacity to attract some of the world’s largest banks. The bigger vision – to get a complete picture of risk for all people and companies globally – has real potential to shake up the market.”
