Unit21 Raises $13 Million to Help Businesses Fight Financial Crime With No-Code Tools

Demonstrates Growth of 400% in 2020 by Helping Risk and Compliance Teams Identify, Investigate & Report Suspicious Activity, New Funding Led by A.Capital

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Unit21, a platform of no-code tools for risk and compliance teams, today announces $13 million in funding led by A.Capital Ventures. Additional participation includes investors such as Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI venture fund), Core VC, South Park Commons, Diane Greene (founder of VMWare), William Hockey (founder of Plaid), Chris Britt and Ryan King (founders of Chime), Sumit Agarwal (founder of Shape Security), and Michael Vaughan (former COO of Venmo). Unit21 will use the new capital to grow its product and distribution-focused management team, increase sales and marketing efforts, and launch in new industries.

Risk and compliance are increasingly expensive departments within companies. In 2019, institutions were fined $8.14 billion in Anti-Money Laundering (AML) fines, nearly double the number and value of penalties from 2018. Rapidly-changing vectors of attack and the unique data that companies have require highly tailored programs for risk and compliance, along with engineering resources to achieve customization for minimal fraud loss and maximum compliance.

Former Affirm and Shape Security employees, Trisha Kothari and Clarence Chio, founded Unit21 in 2018 and work with customers like Intuit, Coinbase, Gusto, and Line to create a powerful & customizable rules engine for risk and compliance teams. Unit21’s highly flexible, customizable, and intelligent cloud-based system provides a configurable engine for transaction monitoring, identity verification, case management, operations management, and analytics and reporting.

“To counter an increasing array of sophisticated fraud vectors that have gone mainstream, risk and compliance teams must build custom detection logic and risk models of dizzying complexity. But now with Unit21, these teams can codify powerful, custom rules on a flexible and easy to use no-code/low-code platform. The dramatic business traction over the past year is evidence of an amazing product with eager customers,” said Ramu Arunachalam, General Partner at A.Capital. “Unit21’s technology will become the canonical way to define and codify risk of all types, with wide-ranging applications across verticals and industries. We’re excited to partner with the talented team at Unit21 to bring its product to more customers and markets.”

Unit21 customer Erik Roodsari, Risk Platform Lead with Intuit said, “Our integration with Unit21 was easy and the team outperformed against an aggressive integration timeline. We saved months of engineering effort by not building these tools in-house.”

Unit21’s inherent customizability lends itself to a wide variety of use cases, such as payment platforms like Gusto and crypto exchanges like Coinbase. The company’s tools have the capability to handle risk and compliance needs across geographies such as North America, Africa, Europe, and Asia.

“We've experienced incredible growth of over 400% this year. Our no-code/low-code approach enables our customers to model risk, instead of struggling to get into engineering roadmaps. We're excited to have numerous titans of the technology industry support us in this journey,” said Trisha Kothari, CEO and co-founder of Unit21.

To learn more about Unit21, visit https://www.unit21.ai

About Unit21

Founded in 2018 and based in San Francisco, Unit21 helps protect businesses against adversaries through a simple API and dashboard for detecting and managing money laundering, fraud, and other sophisticated risks across multiple industries. For more information, visit: https://www.unit21.ai/

About A.Capital

A.Capital provides resources and counsel to the creators, inventors and entrepreneurs who are building a new future. Founded by Ronny Conway in 2014, A.Capital invests in early-stage consumer, enterprise and crypto startups and offers world-class advice, connections, and team-building expertise to help those companies scale. A.Capital's portfolio includes companies like Notion, Pinterest, Airbnb, Weave, Databricks and Hooked. Learn more at www.acapital.com.