Resistant AI a SaaS-based AI and machine learning security company that protects financial services from manipulation, fraud and financial crime, just raised €14.28 million in a Series A funding. GV (formerly Google Ventures) led the financing round, with participation from existing investors Index Ventures, Credo Ventures, Seedcamp, and several angel investors. The fresh capital will be used to meet increasing demand from global financial institutions and to build out Resistant AI’s product, engineering, and sales operations teams beyond Prague, London and New York.
Founded by the team behind Cognitive Security, which was sold to Cisco in 2013, Resistant AI was born in 2019 to respond to the reality of algorithm-driven security and compliance. Customers today expect financial services to be frictionless, instantaneous and fully digital. Intelligent automation is the answer, but the speed and reduction of human involvement brings its own risks. Criminals find ways to exploit loopholes and design sophisticated and scalable fraud attacks – defrauding governments of grants, laundering illicit money and using stolen identities to illegally obtain loans and credit.
Data acquired and reviewed by Resistant AI indicates that:
- 17% of bank statements used for lending applications, ‘know your customer’ regulations and other purposes worldwide are tampered with;
- 11% of UK payslips submitted as part of digital loan applications are altered or forged;
- 15% of company registration certificates submitted worldwide when opening a bank account are fakes;
- 9% of utility bills submitted as a proof of address worldwide are forged
Resistant AI CEO Martin Rehak stated: “Our mission is to create an intelligent shield for autonomous financial systems, to protect them against these ever-evolving, ever-smarter attacks. That’s the only way we can avoid epidemic fraud, mountains of manual reviews and four-factor authentication on every single online service.”
Resistant AI, which is already protecting a number of banks, insurers and financial technology companies, adds an extra layer of reinforcement to existing checks and monitoring systems. Using sophisticated statistical modelling and machine-learning, it supports clients across the whole customer lifecycle, from the onboarding process through the ongoing continuous relationship. Resistant AI helps to:
- Protect credit risk scoring models, payment systems, fraud and advanced machine (AML) learning monitoring, and customer onboarding systems;
- Detect forged documents submitted to mislead or manipulate automated processes;
- Uncover new advanced fraud techniques designed by spotting relationships between seemingly unrelated transactions;
- Increase the effectiveness of finding fake identities, bust-out fraud and approval boundary probing;
- Categorize, prioritize and reduce false alerts.
Tom Hulme, General Partner at GV, commented: “Resistant AI’s founding team has unique expertise in applying AI and machine learning to detect complex and evasive behavior. Early customer traction demonstrates an ability to uncover unknown threats, and reliably categorize and reduce false alerts with transparent, explainable and verifiable detection models.”
Jan Hammer, partner at Index Ventures and Resistant AI board member, stated: “Automation in financial services and the application of AI has enabled banks, fintechs, insurance companies and other players to introduce better products and become more efficient. However, it has also resulted in security gaps, opening up automated processes to fraud. Resistant AI is the much needed oversight that can spot fraud and financial crime in its tracks.”
