kompany, a RegTech platform for Business KYC (KYB) has secured new investment of almost EUR6 million, the company’s largest single investment round to date. kompany will use the new funding to accelerate growth and expand its new product lines, the AI-based shareholder analysis tool UBO discovery and the DLT-based audit-trail solution KYC onchain.
Fairway Global Investment led the round, together with Global Brain, a major venture capital firm based in Tokyo, Japan, who acted as co-investor. Both are global investors in RegTech, FinTech and the payment sector and expect their portfolio companies to benefit from kompany’s technological lead in Business KYC (KYB). Existing shareholders, including the European Super Angels Club and the kompany management team also participated in this round.
“kompany’s Business KYC services have been shown to bring significant efficiency gains for their clients and are particularly relevant to our investments in the payments sector and also our corporate partners. We look forward to leveraging this new partnership with kompany to support our other portfolio companies and partners,” says Naoki Kamimaeda, Partner at Global Brain.
“The smart money understands that RegTech is about turning the burden of compliance into a competitive advantage by enabling customers to drastically reduce client onboarding times by 90 per cent and by completely digitising the process and customer experience,” says kompany Founder & CEO Russell E Perry.
The kompany team has doubled in the last year to outpace the new regulatory realities of highly enforced Anti-Money Laundering regulation in Europe (AMLD 4&5) and the pending US AML regulation. Additionally, in wake of the Covid-19 stimulus measures, governments are pumping trillions into the global economy. This has inadvertently caused a market rush to rapidly digitalise and automate formerly manual compliance processes.
As a result, market interest has seen the value of kompany’s sales pipeline increase to an eight-figure number in the last twelve months. “The current market and regulatory situation warrant a far more automated, audit-proof business verification with an exponentially lower margin of error, as compliance risks have never been higher, and clients increasingly move to seamless digital services,” says Johanna Konrad, COO of kompany.
John Vorrias, Chief Investment Officer at Fairway Global Investment adds: “RegTech generally, and kompany specifically has the potential to be a game-changer in terms of the broad use-case applications across multiple industries and segments. And kompany operates the only real-time proprietary global register network that connects to primary source commercial registers and financial & tax authorities in over 200 countries and jurisdictions.”
The new fundraising round directly supports the further development of two key technologies: the AI-based instant shareholder discovery and the fusion of Digital Identity with Business KYC (KYB) for cross-border payments.
“Our vision is to enable the five second cross-border payment with full AML and KYB compliance embedded,” says Perry. “If you have ever wondered why an international bank transfer can take hours or frequently even days to post – it is directly linked to regulatory requirements and our platform replaces those legacy practices.”
