Diligent AI has closed a $2.5 million financing round led by European venture capital firm Speedinvest and Shapers, with continued participation from Y Combinator. The funding will accelerate product development, expand the company's AI agent suite, and grow its go-to-market team across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Japan.
The round also brings in a group of prominent angel investors, including founders and executives from Allica Bank, N26, CyberSource (Visa), IDnow, and Billie. Speedinvest is led on this deal by Stefan Klestil and Julien Lézé, while Philippe Teixeira da Mota and Thomas Teixeira da Mota represent Shapers.
KYC and AML teams sit at the center of the global financial system. They verify new customers, monitor transactions, and identify signs of fraud and money laundering before they escalate. It is important, difficult work, and right now it is getting harder.
The growth of international sanctions as a geopolitical tool, the rise of fraud and scams, and the sheer volume of digital payments have put compliance teams under pressure that keeps compounding. Skilled analysts who trained to investigate financial crime are increasingly stuck doing repetitive data entry and document checks, forced to prioritize speed over thoroughness.
This is the gap Diligent AI was built to close. Founded by Edoardo Maschio and Ahmed Gaber, the company builds AI agents that handle routine KYC and AML workflows end to end, freeing analysts to focus on judgment rather than data processing.
Diligent's agents handle merchant and SMB onboarding risk reviews, adverse media analysis, and payment sanctions alert remediation. They read documents, reason through evidence, and produce structured, auditable outputs, doing the heavy lifting so compliance professionals can concentrate on the decisions that actually require human expertise.
The product is already live at a range of regulated institutions. Clients include Flywire (NASDAQ: FLYW), Allica Bank, Teya, and Digital Garage (TYO: 4819), alongside payment companies and global fintechs across five regions.
"Diligent AI significantly reduced our onboarding workflows and eliminated repetitive tasks for our team, supporting the quality of our processes by making them consistent and auditable." — Maureen Gorman, Head of Global Operations, Alma
"Diligent AI agents helped us slash our risk review times significantly, but more importantly, helped us build a stronger and more systematic approach to risk detection." — Karan Khanna, Fraud Strategy Manager, Tamara
The fresh capital will fund two main priorities. First, Diligent plans significant product expansion, adding new AI agents for additional compliance task types and strengthening its existing suite. Second, the company is building out its go-to-market team to support customers globally at a faster pace.
Diligent is actively hiring across the board, from backend and machine learning engineers to go-to-market associates. The company's longer-term goal is straightforward: ensure that the people defending the financial system have better tools than those trying to exploit it.
Diligent AI was founded to address a specific, well-documented failure point in financial compliance: the gap between the complexity of modern financial crime and the manual, repetitive workflows still used to fight it. Maschio and Gaber built the company around the idea that AI agents should complete investigations, not just surface alerts that humans then process from scratch.
What sets Diligent apart is the depth of its deployment context. It is not a tool built for testing environments or pilot programs. Its agents are already handling live compliance reviews at S&P 500 companies, regulated banks, and global payment networks, producing consistent, auditable decisions at scale.
The team brings a combination of engineering and domain expertise suited to regulated, high-stakes environments, exactly the type of context where the margin for error is lowest.
Speedinvest is a European venture capital firm with more than €1 billion in assets under management. The firm backs technology startups across Europe through dedicated sector teams, supporting founders on growth, hiring, and market development. Its portfolio includes Bitpanda, GoStudent, Wayflyer, and Tide.
Shapers joins as co-lead alongside Speedinvest, with both firms bringing deep experience in fintech infrastructure and regulated financial services. The angel investors in this round, founders and executives from some of the most recognized names in European fintech, add a layer of industry knowledge that goes well beyond capital.
Together, this investor group has built and scaled KYC and AML solutions now in use at some of the largest financial institutions globally. For a company operating in a compliance-heavy sector, that network is genuinely useful.
