Compliance is where ambition goes to get audited. It is the quiet tax on every bank, fintech, and public company that wants to grow without a regulator breathing down its neck. So when Sphinx locks in $7.1 million in seed funding, you do not just clap politely. You pay attention.
Cherry Ventures led the round, with Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Deel Ventures, and Singularity Capital stepping in. That is not tourist capital. That is conviction capital. The kind that studies a $200 billion annual compliance spend and says, there is a smarter way to carry this weight.
Respect where it is due. Congratulations to Alexandre Berkovic, Co-founder and CEO of Sphinx, and Chrisjan Wüst, Co-founder and CTO of Sphinx. Two operators who have already built and exited together, now back in the arena with sharper tools and longer vision. Chrisjan Wüst helped build AML and onboarding infrastructure for more than 15 million users at RelyComply. Alexandre Berkovic brings AI research roots from Imperial College London and MIT. This is not theory dressed up as product. This is scar tissue turned into software.
Sphinx is not another dashboard begging for a login. It is browser-native AI compliance agents that live inside the systems teams already use. Case management tools. Third-party portals. PDFs. Email. Internal dashboards. The agents review alerts, run AML, KYC, and KYB checks, draft RFIs, document decisions, and leave behind a regulator-ready audit trail that explains every move. Explainable and insurable. That last word should make every chief risk officer lean in.
The proof is not in the pitch deck. It is in the backlog. Sphinx agents have handled millions of alerts and hundreds of thousands of cases. Customers have cleared months of compliance drag in days. Equals Money saw a 94 percent reduction in false positives while catching more true positives. Some institutions are expanding internationally without adding compliance headcount, cutting operating costs by up to four times. In a world where growth usually means hiring faster than you can train, that is a different rhythm.
Here is the lesson for founders watching from the sidelines. They did not chase vanity metrics. They went straight at a line item that keeps CFOs up at night. They built into existing workflows instead of demanding rip and replace. They made the invisible work visible and defensible. When your product can sit in the browser and quietly outperform an outsourced review house, you are not competing on features. You are competing on inevitability.
Sphinx is scaling what it calls an agentic compliance workforce across more than a dozen regions, adapting to local regulations without forcing teams to rebuild their stack. In a market where trust is currency and documentation is oxygen, that feels less like incremental improvement and more like infrastructure being rewritten in real time.
