Financial Crime Prevention Startup Silent Eight Raises $40M

Singapore-based financial crime prevention firm Silent Eight has closed a $40 million Series B funding round, the company said in a news release Wednesday (March 9).

The funding, led by TYH Ventures, will go chiefly to expand technology the company’s technological functions and help Silent Eight hire more than 150 data scientists, developers and engineers this year.

The company said it has raised $55 million to date and has seen its revenue grow by six times since October 2020. Silent Eight uses artificial intelligence to root out financial crime, investigation suspicious transactions, beneficiaries and customers in real time.

Also joining in the latest funding round: HSBC Ventures, which is itself a customer of Silent Eight, along with OTB Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures, Aglaia and Koh Boon Hwee, chairman and general partner of Altara Ventures.

Founded in 2013, Silent Eight said it was born out of desire to deal with the “human cost” of financial crimes.

“Today’s stakes are high, with the number of victims of human trafficking, terrorist financing and money laundering rising,” the company said on its website.

“Meanwhile, bad actors continue to be savvy and creative in their endeavors to slip through the net. It is our goal to provide a technology solution that prevents them from engaging in the global economy and profiting off of those most vulnerable,” it continued.

Not taking steps to address practices like money laundering can be costly for financial institutions, as PYMNTS noted last year.

Read more: Report: Real-Time Transaction Analysis Helps Firms Root Out Fraud, Money Laundering

Oversight agencies are cracking down on banks with lackluster anti-money laundering (AML) procedures, with more than $6.8 billion in compliance violation fines levied against 28 financial institutions (FIs) in 14 countries in 2020.

The largest single penalty was handed down to Australian bank Westpac, which was hit with a $900 million fine for its failure to report more than 19 million cross-border transactions, some of which were allegedly tied to human trafficking operations in the Philippines.