Berlin-based Elucidate raises €2.5 million in move to become the universal standard in financial crime risk management

Elucidate aims to become the Moody’s of financial crime risk, and have just announced their raise of €2.5 million in a pre-Series-A funding led by Frontline Ventures.

Frontline Ventures is joined by existing investors Seed X Liechtenstein, APEX Ventures, and Big Start Ventures. Elucidate has now raised over €5 million in seven short months following a round in July 2020.

The company is expected to use the fresh funds to expand their rating coverage to 100% of the market and accelerate market penetration to the public sector and regulators. Elucidate is currently utilised by over 2,700 financial institutions, providing risk scores for users across five continents.

Elucidate’s self-titled EFI (Elucidate’s FinCrime Index) is the industry’s only regulated financial crime risk tool and uses probability and machine learning to predict and prevent FinCrime before it happens (Minority Report anyone?). The USP here is the removal of manually determined reactions points towards a new universal standard for financial crime risk analysis and scoring.

With crimes such as money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions, cybercrime, fraud, corruption and tax evasion continuing to rise, financial institutions are spending around 3% of revenue solely on risk management, with limited results. This translates into criminal abuse of the financial sector with little to no detection, and almost no fear of prosecution.

“The US passed the world’s first anti-money laundering legislation 50 years ago and we continue to see scandals emerge with shocking regularity. Our deep learning dataset is unparalleled in the industry, identifying financial crime patterns as they emerge,” comments Elucidate co-founder and CEO Shane Riedel. “Just as John Moody revolutionised the way credit risk was understood in 1909, Elucidate’s universal standard is enabling the next wave in financial crime risk management.”