Anti-money laundering startup Salv raises $2M Seed round to stop financial crime

Financial crime is on the increase and bad actors are always a step ahead of most companies. In fact, 94% of companies say sharing intelligence is the key to tackling financial crime. But don’t because of the huge risk of data leaks. Despite increasing restrictions and laws, financial crime is still rampant today. Only 1-2% of criminals are detected, let alone punished.

Sadly, throwing thousands of more people at the problem doesn’t help. Fully compliant banks are still making headlines every day for their anti-money laundering (AML) scandals. Criminals are still outsmarting the best. It’s time to change that. Enter Salv, an Estonia-based FinTech startup revolutionizing the financial compliance sector with smart technology. Salv goes beyond compliance to help financial companies fight and stop financial crime.

Just this week, Salv announced it has raised $2 million in seed funding for its anti-money laundering (AML), crimefighting platform for financial companies. The round was led by Fly Ventures, with participation from Passion Capital and Seedcamp. Other backers included angel investors  N26 founder Maximilian Tayenthal, former Twilio CTO Ott Kaukver, and Taavi Kotka, former CIO for Estonia.

Founded in 2018 by former TransferWise and Skype employees, Salv’s platform helps banks find and stop financial crime. Salv’s realtime bank2bank data sharing platform uses GDPR compliant, cryptographically secure multiparty computation to eliminate data leak risks. Secure datasharing gives institutions the financial puzzle pieces they need to catch more criminals, recover more funds, and protect more good customers. Even though the company was started in June 2018, it wasn’t until October 2019 the company acquired its best brand and exact match “.com” domain name, Salv.com, from its past owner.

No company can fight financial crime alone. Salv has built an entire ‘synthetic bank’ with millions of active customers and criminal patterns. Which means a financial institution can first test out Salv’s platform before committing to anything. They can try out your own typologies and risk rules.