Hummingbird, which sells anti-money laundering software to banks and fintechs, announced today that it has raised $ 30 million in Series B under the direction of new investor Battery Ventures. Existing investors Flourish and Homebrew also took part in the round, alongside FinVC and Plaid co-founder William Hockey.

The round, which is Hummingbird’s first since its $ 8.2 million Serie A last year, brings the total fundraising to $ 41.8 million. The company plans to use the proceeds to expand its 35-strong team, particularly in the areas of customer success, engineering and product design, CEO Joe Robinson said in an interview with TechCrunch.

Hummingbird’s founding team is made up of fintech veterans, roughly half of whom are from Block (formerly known as Square) and the other half from blockchain payments company Circle, Robinson said. Robinson himself spent about two years in risk and data science at Circle, where he recognized some of the challenges compliance professionals face as it drives the company forward less than 1% success rate global controls to combat money laundering.

“There are a lot of data sources and risk signals and algorithms that are great, but they are very, very difficult to put them together for investigation. The work is done in really raw formats across many different systems, ”said Robinson.

Hummingbird CEO Joe Robinson. Credit: humming-bird

Financial crime investigators typically work 100 to 200 cases a week, Robinson said. The team set about building a specialized CRM for compliance and risk teams that would bring these different data sets together on one platform and help them cope with these large numbers of cases.

Hummingbird’s customers today include payment companies like Stripe, crypto exchanges like Coinbase, and banking-as-a-service provider Evolve Bank & Trust, according to Robinson, despite the company’s refusal to divide the total number of customers it serves . The company, which is represented in seven countries, also works with e-commerce customers such as Etsy.

The story goes on

It plans to launch in the UK early next year and eventually grow its presence in Europe and expand to regions in Asia, Robinson said.

In terms of its product, the startup is particularly focused on iterating its design in the next phase of growth.

“We believe this practice area is one of the most overlooked and unloved spaces for great design thinking, and we want to be the first to bring this to this space,” said Robinson.

Michael Brown of Battery Ventures who has invested in several fintech companies including MX Technologies, AuditBoard and Next Insurance, directed the investment in Hummingbird.

Kolibri RegTech

Kolibri RegTech

Credit: humming-bird“Hummingbird is the only cloud-based provider focused on being the end-to-end workflow platform for risk and compliance professionals – the crime fighters in finance,” Brown said in an email to TechCrunch . “There are a lot of startups that sell narrow products in different areas within the broader Fraud / Know-Your-Customer / Anti-Money Laundering area. But nobody tries to own the workflow layer and to connect all these different systems with one another. “