Notion Capital backs Czech startup Resistant AI with €10M to fight against financial crime

Prague-based Resistant AI, a company that protects financial services from financial crime, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $11M (approximately €10M) from Notion Capital.

The new funding  brings the company’s total Series A round to $27.6M (approximately €25.2M) and adds to the existing funding from GV, Index Ventures, Credo Ventures, and Seedcamp.

The new investment builds on Resistant AI’s expansion of its product, team, and geographical presence. This is to meet the growing demand from financial institutions to protect their onboarding and transaction systems from malicious attacks.

Martin Rehak, CEO and Founder of Resistant AI, says “With this investment from Notion Capital we can build on this success and bring our solution to more institutions in the face of these increasingly pernicious threats. We are excited to work with Notion Capital, particularly because of their expertise and track record in successfully growing computer security companies.”

At present, as many as 17 per cent of bank statements/utility bills/paychecks used for lending applications, ‘know your customer’ (KYC) regulations, and other purposes worldwide are tampered with, and 15 per cent of company registration certificates submitted worldwide when opening bank accounts are fakes. 

The financial industry needs a new approach to tackling financial crime, particularly in the face of automated AI-driven attacks, which can generate authentic fraudulent identities at scale for fraud and money-laundering purposes.

Rehak says, “The transition from traditional finance to fintech has brought creativity and opportunities for customers, but there has been an accompanying rise in criminals exploiting these new services. Resistant AI’s unique machine learning application tackles these ever-changing threats.” 

Resistant AI: Protecting financial services from threat

Founded in 2019 by Martin Rehak, Resistant AI has developed state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to protect financial services from manipulation and attack. 

The company’s solutions look for anomalies in documents, transactions, serial fraud, synthetic identities, account takeovers, money laundering, and behaviours. This provides a 360-degree view of each customer, which can double the number of threats detected.

The Czech company’s solutions protect a number of banks and fintech companies across the customer life cycle, including Dun and Bradstreet, Payoneer, Habito, Planet42, and ComplyAdvantage. 

Resistant AI now has over 80 team members working across offices in Prague, London, Brussels, and New York.

Last year, the company witnessed drastic growth, including a doubled customer base, ARR increased 6x, and monthly usage increased 4x YoY. 

The investor

Notion is a venture capital firm focused on high-potential businesses in the Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) markets. 

Kamil Mieczakowski, Principal at Notion Capital, says, “Security and fintech are 2 of the largest areas of focus for Notion and we love how the Resistant AI proposition ties them together. Synthetic identity fraud has been named the fastest-growing financial crime in the US, with $6bn in total losses to the banking sector in 2021 alone, and the Resistant AI product is the only comprehensive solution out there that moves as fast as the fraudsters do. We’re excited to be working with them so they can meet the growing demand for their solution.”