Monnai, a Santa Monica-based risk analytics platform, announced in mid-January it raised $12 million in equity funding at a time when artificial intelligence is powering a faster global identity and risk data for banks and fintech platforms.
The capital infusion was led by Motive Partners, with additional participation from existing investors like Commerce Ventures and 500 Global.
“As AI enables accelerated software development cycles, we see increasing demand for high-fidelity data and growing value and differentiation in the complex underlying data infrastructure that powers the application layer,” Thomas Harris, a principal at Motive Partners, said in a statement.
While AI is the new technology on everyone’s minds, the process of cleaning data – by removing duplicate data points, deleting corrupted data or converting data into uniform units – remains one of its biggest constraints.This bottleneck has become increasingly clear as parts of the world transition away from cash and embrace online banking with very little data to verify their identity.
Monnai was founded in 2021 by Pierre Demarche and Ravish Patel, who both started the company in order to collect and organize different data sources with different methods of collection, clean the data so it becomes uniform, and use it to help financial institutions verify information in order to prevent fraud.
“While risk models and AI-driven decisioning continue to advance, their effectiveness is fundamentally constrained by the quality of the data behind them,” Demarche, the chief executive of Monnai, said in a statement. “With this funding, we will accelerate our ability to deliver high-quality identity and risk insights across billions of identities, while expanding local coverage and improving performance across key markets in Europe and Latin America.”
The company operates across four continents, all with different regulatory requirements for banks that Monnai has to meet.
