Estonian-based Salv, the anti-money laundering startup founded by former TransferWise and Skype employees, has raised €1.8 million in seed funding.
The funding round was led by Fly Ventures, alongside Passion Capital and Seedcamp, and prominent angel investors such as Maximilian Tayenthal (N26 founder) and Taavi Kotka (former CIO for Estonia).
Salv, founded in 2018, has grown from offering consultancy services, to a platform that fights financial crime. They estimate that only 1-2% of global money laundering is detected, and offer a smart technology solution that they claim is not only effective at actually stopping online financial fraud, but is also user-friendly, fast to set up and easy to integrate into existing systems.
The Salv dashboard is an intuitive product equipping compliance specialists with the tools they need to reduce time on false-positive alerts. It puts the compliance officer in the driver’s seat by eliminating the necessity of constantly engaging support from engineers. Salv’s product is said to be suitable for Tier 2 and Tier 3 banks, as well as regulated fintechs and challenger banks. They charge a monthly subscription, with the price depending on the number of active customers a bank or fintech has.
Founders have previously worked in the anti-fraud and engineering teams at Skype and TransferWise, giving them a unique insight into the problem. This seems to have made an impact, as they can already count Estonian bank LHV as their first customer.
CEO Tamkivi comments, “Our system takes a month or less to set up and minutes to modify the rules. As a result, our customers can take everything they learn today from new criminal patterns, encode it in automated rules tomorrow, and repeat that cycle every day to protect their bank. Moving fast is the only way to keep up with the innovative organised criminals moving millions or billions around the world”.
Maximilian Tayenthal, co-founder of N26, said: “For the past ten years, the team at Salv have been at the forefront of anti-money laundering and helped many of the world’s leading tech companies to protect their platforms from financial crime. They understand the rapid development of AML inside out and it shows in the simple and effective product.”
