Sphinx, the company building browser-native compliance agents for financial institutions, has closed a $7.1 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures. Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Deel Ventures, and Singularity Capital also participated. The funding will be used to scale Sphinx's agentic compliance workforce as banks and fintechs increasingly rely on it for core AML, KYC, and KYB operations.
Most RegTech products ask financial institutions to adopt a new system. Sphinx takes the opposite approach. Its agents operate directly inside the tools institutions already use: case management platforms, third-party portals, PDFs, email, and internal dashboards. They review alerts, run AML and KYB checks, gather supporting research, draft RFIs, and capture their reasoning in a complete, regulator-ready audit trail. Teams typically go live within days.
"Compliance today is mostly human glue between systems that were never designed to work together," said Alexandre Berkovic, Co-Founder and CEO. "Sphinx takes on that work directly so analysts can focus on the judgment calls — and institutions finally get a complete, defensible record of how every decision was made."
Financial institutions collectively spend more than $200 billion a year on compliance teams and outsourced review operations doing work that software was simply never built to handle. Sphinx was built specifically for that gap. Its browser-native architecture lets it function across different workflows and regulatory frameworks, and the company says it already operates across more than a dozen regions.
In production, Sphinx agents have handled millions of alerts and hundreds of thousands of cases. Customers report clearing months-long backlogs in days, faster client onboarding, and materially lower exposure to compliance errors and potential fines. Equals Money, one of its customers, saw a 94% reduction in false positives while still catching more true positives. Several institutions now operate internationally without expanding their compliance headcount, cutting operational costs by up to 4x.
The new capital will be directed toward scaling Sphinx's agentic compliance workforce to meet demand from banks and fintechs. The company's goal is not to supplement compliance teams with one more tool. It wants to do the actual work.
Sphinx also aims to expand its presence across new markets and regulatory environments. Every decision made by a Sphinx agent is logged and explainable, which the company says makes automated compliance auditable, scalable, and ultimately insurable — a distinction that matters to regulated institutions thinking long-term about liability.
Sphinx was founded by Alexandre Berkovic and Chrisjan Wüst. Chrisjan built AML and onboarding infrastructure serving more than 15 million users as the first employee at RelyComply. Alexandre specialized in AI research at Imperial College London and MIT. This is their second company together, following a prior exit.
The team includes former compliance officers from global banks, ex-operators, and PhDs. That combination of financial industry experience and technical depth informs the product's design — agents built to be defensible by regulators, not just convenient for operators.
Sphinx currently works with large banks, global fintechs, and neobanks looking to eliminate manual reviews, reduce operational risk, and expand into new markets quickly.
Filip Dames, Founding Partner at Cherry Ventures, explained what drew the firm to lead the round: "Sphinx isn't just a software, it's critical operational infrastructure that meets teams where they are: in their systems, procedures, and day-to-day reality. Very few products can function inside that level of complexity. That's what's driving such rapid adoption across banks and fintechs."
Alongside Cherry Ventures, the round includes participation from Y Combinator, which backed Sphinx during its batch, as well as Rebel Fund, Deel Ventures, and Singularity Capital. This $7.1 million seed represents Sphinx's first institutional raise.
