Fintech Company Ballerine Announces $5M Seed Funding to Deliver Open Source Risk Decision Platform
The first-of-its-kind open source platform allows businesses to verify and sign their business customers globally or at scale; Funding round led by Team8, with participation from Y Combinator, Vera Equity, and executives from Brex, Trulioo, Venmo, Melio and Coinbase
TEL AVIV, Israel and NEW YORK, 23 May 2023–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Ballerine, an open source risk decision platform, has raised $5 million in a seed funding round led by Team8. The company offers an open source platform that integrates global data sources, along with the necessary tools to automate and improve decision-making processes for tasks such as onboarding (KYB), underwriting and transaction monitoring. Ballerine caters to any business handling financial transactions subject to KYB, KYC and anti-money laundering regulations, including most financial institutions, FinTechs, e-commerce, marketplaces and other businesses. Ballerine is experiencing rapid growth and traction, its open source GitHub repository has attracted over 1,500 developers worldwide, with dozens of fintech companies using the code in production.
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In order from left to right are: Nitzan Guy (Co-Founder and CPO), Noam Izhaki (Co-Founder and CEO), Alon Peretz (Co-Founder and CTO). (Photo: Business Wire)
The company was founded by an expert team of developers from the digital banking area with extensive experience in building internal risk infrastructure, and a first-hand understanding of the many challenges associated with the development and maintenance of internal risk systems. The founding team, Noam Izhaki (CEO), Nitzan Guy (CPO) and Alon Peretz (CTO), launched Ballerine to solve the pain points they faced using a developer-first, open source and modular approach.
Traditionally, it is a complex task to verify, underwrite and monitor businesses. It involves extensive data collection from multiple sources, documentation and policy updates due to changes in regulations, threats and best practices. This complexity increases exponentially as companies expand into new geographies or add new products and lines of business. Ballerine simplifies this task, enabling developers to fully customize their risk assessment workflow through a point solution marketplace. Data sources can be accessed via a single commercial agreement with Ballerine or through commercialization directly with data providers. These sources include, but are not limited to: company registers, sanctions, websites/social, credit bureaus, unwanted media, PEP databases, UBO registers and Open-Banking.
“The financial industry desperately needs infrastructure to support its ongoing digital transformation, infrastructure that empowers institutions to automatically access and analyze data throughout the customer journey,” said Noam Izhaki, CEO and Co-Founder of Ballerine, “Ballerine offers exactly that – it leverages distributed data, simplifies privacy management and enables companies to continuously improve their risk decision-making processes while maintaining control and flexibility.”
Ballerine’s open source core gives developers and risk managers control over their infrastructure with a single integration and allows customization to meet specific needs around customer experience, risk exposure, audience and geography. Ballerine’s open source platform is the next generation infrastructure for risk and identity decisioning, as it offers significantly more flexibility for global financial services and large institutions, addresses many more use cases, and provides more room for customers to extend and customize the platform.
“Ballerine has a real opportunity to transform the way any business handling financial transactions manages risk.” said Hadar Siterman Norris, Partner at Team8. “This funding will help Ballerine create the first open source and developer-centric compliance infrastructure, which is sure to propel Ballerine to even greater heights. We are excited to be a part of their journey.”
The funding round was led by Team8 with participation from Y Combinator, Vera Equity and executives from Brex, Trulioo, Venmo, Melio and Coinbase. Ballerine and Team8 will participate in Money 20/20 in Amsterdam, 6-8. June 2023. Noam Izhaki, Ballerine’s CEO and co-founder, will address the conference during a presentation, “Open-Source is Coming: Watch Out Financial Services.” To learn more about Ballerine, visit: www.ballerine.com.
About Ballerina
Ballerine is an open source platform that enables businesses offering financial products and services to verify and guarantee their customers globally or at scale. Their technology gives developers and risk managers maximum control over compliance infrastructure with a single integration, and can be easily customized to meet specific needs around customer experience, risk exposure, audience and geography. Ballerine addresses any business that handles financial transactions that are subject to KYB/KYC and money laundering regulations. This includes almost all financial institutions and fintechs, as well as many e-commerce, marketplaces and SaaS companies. For more information, visit https://www.ballerine.com/
About Team8
Team8 is a venture group that builds and invests in the most innovative technologies in fintech, cyber, data and digital health. We leverage deep domain expertise, cutting-edge technology and first-hand business-building experience to partner with entrepreneurs to establish globally successful companies, while investing in early-stage companies active in the group’s fields of interest. Visit www.team8.vc to learn more.
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