Financial crime fighter Quantexa raises $153 million

As our world grows increasingly digital, for all the good, there’s also all the bad. Financial criminals are no longer stuffing suitcases and running the goods through “legitimate” businesses; they’re taking down significant portions of financial institutions with a few strokes of the keyboard. According to EY, “The estimated annual cost of money laundering and associated crimes is $1.4 trillion to $3.5 trillion.”

And if the bad boys are playing with the big tools, why aren’t the good guys doing the same? Well, London-based Quantexa is aiming to change that and has just raised $153 million in Series-D funding provided by Warburg Pincus and an allotment of undisclosed blue-chip investors. Existing investors Dawn Capital, AlbionVC, Evolution Equity Partners, HSBC, ABN AMRO Ventures, and British Patient Capital also followed on.

Quantexa was founded in 2016 by Imam Hoque, former managing director of fraud and financial crime EMEA/AP at SAS, and Vishal Marria, former executive director at EY. Realising that the world around them was rapidly changing, and yet the financial industry wasn’t keeping pace, the duo set out to solve the age-old problem of connecting the dots between internal and external data sources. According to the firm, their usage of big data and AI results in a 60x  faster analytical model resolution than traditional approaches.

It would appear that through Quantexa the “problem” has found a “solution”, namely via the company’s Contextual Decision Intelligence (CDI) platform. Clients are able to generate a scalable, true single customer view and utilise data and analytics tech including Entity Resolution, Graph Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence to create graph-based network views.

To date, Quantexa has been deployed in over 70 countries, serving thousands of clients including banks, insurers, and government bodies. 7 of the top 10 UK and Australian banks and 6 of the top 14 financial institutions in North America all employ Quantexa’s technology. Accenture, Deloitte, Microsoft, and Google are also paying customers.

“What excites us most is the growing demand we see across sectors for enterprises to realise meaningful value from their data across the organisation. Quantexa is supporting customer innovation so they can make trusted operational decisions, commented CEO Marria. “We have seen the need for Contextual Decisioning increase exponentially within the financial sector and with this round we are able to capitalise on the growing demand for CDI across multiple new sectors in a market worth over $114 billion according to IDC.”

Moreover, Quantexa is leading the charge with data for good, and their technology is now being used in areas such as anti-human trafficking.

“Quantexa’s proprietary technology enables clients to create single views of individuals and entities, visualized through graph network analytics and scaled with the most advanced AI technology. This capability has already revolutionized the way KYC, AML and fraud processes are run by some of the world’s largest financial institutions and governments, addressing a significant gap in an increasingly important part of the industry,” concluded Warburg Pincus’ Adarsh Sarma.