When your business model is “catch the bad guys before the regulators catch you not catching them,” you’d better bring something better than yesterday’s spreadsheet with a new coat of UI paint. Castellum.AI isn’t just playing the compliance game; they’re building the rulebook, selling the whistle, and training the ref. And now, with a fresh $8.5 million Series A, oversubscribed, of course, they’ve got the ammo to scale what’s arguably one of the most advanced financial crime compliance stacks on the market.
Let’s be clear: financial institutions have been drowning in false positives, legacy platforms built like they’re still worried about floppy disk storage, and regulations that read like Kafka got bored one day. Peter Piatetsky and Julian Vasilkoski built isn’t a fix; it’s a full-on re-architecture of how risk gets surfaced, screened, and shut down. Piatetsky, a former OFAC regulator with Treasury chops and banking battle scars, met the moment with a vision that said, “if I can’t find the data I need to stop the flow of dirty money, no one can.” Julian brought the high-frequency trading brainpower and built the technical backbone, lightning-fast, AI-native, and multilingual in over 100 languages. Together, they made Castellum.AI the compliance engine for the world that’s actually here, not the one the spreadsheets promised.
This round? Led by Curql, the VC that rolls with 130+ credit unions including Navy Federal. They’re betting big on Castellum.AI’s ability to rewire compliance at the institutional level. Joining in are BTech Consortium, backed by a dozen+ banks including Customers Bank, and Framework Venture Partners, whose cap table includes Tier 1 Canadian giants like RBC. Spider Capital, Remarkable Ventures, and Cameron Ventures are all back for another round, which tells you everything you need to know about this company’s trajectory.
The growth numbers don’t whisper. 1,250% user growth since beta. False positives slashed by 94%. Compliance review time down 83%. Sponsor bank costs dropped 88%. Their AI agents didn’t just pass the CAMS exam; they aced it on the first try. And yes, they’re SOC2 Type II certified, for those who care about sleep at night.
Real-time risk data. 1,600+ watchlists. Patented enrichment tech. Jgram algorithmic matching. Fortune 500 users. Government agencies. 20+ countries. And, because there’s always one more thing, they offer a money-back guarantee if they don’t reduce your false positives.
So no, Castellum.AI isn’t a regtech company. It’s an intelligence platform posing as a SaaS product. Built for compliance teams tired of chasing ghosts and cleaning up messes caused by outdated systems pretending to be smart.
