Castellum.AI Raises Series A
I am excited to announce that Castellum.AI – the only financial crime compliance platform with in-house risk data, AML/KYC screening and AI agents – has closed an oversubscribed $8.5m Series A round.
This is not just a milestone for our company, but for our clients and everyone who believes that AML/KYC can be faster, more accurate and more reliable.
Our Series A round was led by Curql, a fund backed by over 130 credit unions, including Navy Federal, with participation from BTech Consortium, a fund backed by over a dozen banks including Customers Bank, and Framework Venture Partners, a fund backed by Tier 1 financial institutions including RBC. Our seed investors Spider Capital, Remarkable Ventures and Cameron Ventures continued to support us and participated in this round.
We couldn’t have asked for a better investor fit. We help financial services identify and prevent financial crime. Receiving Series A funding from the institutions we serve validates that we solve the biggest problems facing compliance teams.
Why this matters now
Across financial services, 99% of AML/KYC alerts are false positives. This means compliance teams spend thousands of hours reviewing alerts, while financial crime slips through the cracks.
We’ve eliminated the tradeoff between accuracy and speed. With Castellum.AI, you no longer have to delay transactions or onboarding, as compliance teams instantly review and decision alerts. This means analysts can focus their time on high-impact cases.
Helping compliance teams save time while finding risk more accurately
We deliver value to compliance teams by combining global risk data, a high-performance screening engine, and AI agents—all built in-house. We source risk data directly from issuing authorities and publishers, leveraging our patented enrichment process, and enable compliance teams to accurately identify risk across customers, counterparties and transactions.
Here’s how we improved operational efficiency for compliance teams:
A BaaS bank cut their AML/KYC review costs by 88% using our screening platform
A Fortune 50 reduced their time on Level 1 KYC alerts by 83% using our AI agents
A bank reduced their false positives by 94% when switching from a legacy provider
A Top 5 crypto exchange now updates their risk data every 5 minutes, not daily
Validated and trained: Our AI agent passes a CAMS practice exam
Today, we’re also making a major announcement: Our AI agents have passed a CAMS practice exam on the first try. Our agents incorporate former regulator-led training to incorporate guidance from the OCC, NCUA, OFAC, FinCEN and other financial services regulators.
Combined with detailed audit records covering each decision, institutions have the confidence to deploy an AI agent that aligns with regulatory expectations to the front lines of financial crime prevention.
Reducing switching costs, speeding up implementations
One of the biggest pain points for financial institutions is the switching cost of changing their AML/KYC vendors. Our ability to layer AI agents on top of existing platforms enables us to work with, not against, a client’s tech stack. These modular implementations incorporate each institution’s risk requirements and procedures, reducing switching costs.
Becoming the Go-To Partner for AI in AML/KYC
We’ll be using our new investment to grow our engineering, customer success and go to market teams to meet growing demand for AI agents from compliance teams at banks, credit unions and other institutions in the financial services space. We’re also investing in partnerships and integrations to deliver immediate value to compliance teams within their existing workflows.
If you’re a compliance leader dealing with AML/KYC alert backlogs and concerned about what you might be missing, get in touch with us.
