Y Combinator-backed, London-based Diligent AI has raised $2.5 million in seed funding to expand its platform that deploys autonomous analysts for financial crime investigations. The round was led by Speedinvest alongside fintech-focused investor Shapers.
The investment also drew support from prominent fintech founders and CEOs behind companies such as N26, Allica Bank, IDnow, Billie and Cybersource. Diligent AI disclosed to TFN that the total funding raised is $3 million but the valuation remains undisclosed.
With the new funding, Diligent AI plans to expand its engineering team and accelerate deployment across the UK and Europe. As financial crime networks become increasingly sophisticated, the company believes the institutions defending the financial system need tools capable of keeping pace.
Detailing on the plans for the next year, the company said. “Expand engineering team + product launching a new AI Agent for new AML operations tasks.”
Compliance teams face a battlefield
Behind every digital payment or new bank account lies a rigorous process. Compliance teams perform Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) checks to confirm identities, monitor behaviour and flag suspicious activity.
Yet the scale of this responsibility has grown dramatically. The surge in global sanctions, the rapid rise of online fraud and the sheer speed of digital payments have pushed compliance departments to their limits.
Professionals trained to investigate financial crime often find themselves stuck in repetitive administrative work, collecting data, reviewing alerts and ticking boxes rather than conducting meaningful investigations.
The pressure creates a difficult trade-off: process as many cases as possible or dig deeper into the ones that truly matter.
Building the next generation of compliance infrastructure
As revealed to TFN by Diligent AI, “The company was founded by Edoardo Maschio (ex BCG financial services consultant and investor at Rocket Internet), Ahmed Gaber (ex CTO of Europe’s largest b2b payment platform and BNPL – Billie). We met via Rocket Internet in Berlin as Billie is a portfolio company of GFC (part of Rocket Internet group).”
Their goal is to modernise financial crime prevention by combining advanced reasoning systems with domain expertise in compliance.
By equipping compliance teams with autonomous investigative support, Diligent AI is attempting to restore balance to a field where the stakes are high and the workload never stops.
Autonomous analysts investigating like human experts
Diligent AI aims to rebalance this equation by introducing autonomous analysts capable of handling the most time-consuming investigative steps. These autonomous analysts support compliance teams tasked with identifying financial crime. Its platform is already used by banks, fintech companies and publicly listed payment processors to strengthen KYC operations.
Its platform replaces static compliance workflows with intelligent agents designed to read information, interpret risk signals and perform structured investigations. These agents automate routine KYC and AML tasks such as evaluating small-business risk profiles, analysing adverse media coverage and resolving sanctions or payment-screening alerts.
Instead of spending hours gathering scattered information, compliance teams receive structured insights that allow them to focus on final judgement and strategic decisions.
By automating the information-gathering process and contextual analysis, the platform shifts compliance professionals away from manual data work and back toward investigative thinking, the role they originally trained for.
Real-world adoption across global financial institutions
The platform is already embedded within financial institutions operating across Europe, the United States, the Middle East and Japan. Among its users are Flywire, Alma, Teya and Tamara.
These organisations rely on Diligent’s agents to handle sanctions alerts, politically exposed person (PEP) checks, adverse-media investigations and merchant risk reviews. The system is also used to streamline onboarding processes for new customers.
Institutions report noticeable operational savings while maintaining a higher standard of investigation. Because the platform applies a consistent review framework to every alert, it ensures that each case receives the same level of scrutiny, without fatigue or time pressure.
What about diversity?
Talking about the diversity statistics, Diligent AI added, “We are extremely diverse, in the core founding/early team we have an Egyptian founder, italian founder, British/Chinese engineer, and Hong-Kong citizen woman.”
“We are building this for the analysts,” said Edoardo Maschio, CEO and Co-founder of Diligent AI. “When you strip away repetitive tasks – like clearing false positive alerts, searching corporate registries and public records, cross-referencing adverse media – you free up the human mind to focus on judgment and strategy. It’s decision-making instead of data processing. We’re not just making teams faster; we’re enabling them to do the job they were hired to do.”
Gabriele Alessi, Head of Operations at Scalapay – leading payment unicorn serving 8M+ customers and over 20,000 merchants said, “Diligent AI agents radically improved both the efficiency and effectiveness of our merchant due diligence reviews – delivering a 65% reduction in manually reviewed risk queues and saving 6,000 hours from manual reviews annually, while significantly reducing onboarding time and risk exposure.”
Karan Khanna, Fraud Strategy Manager at Tamara – leading fintech super app, serving 20M customers and over 30,000 merchants, said “Diligent AI agents helped us slash our risk review times significantly, but more importantly, helped us build a stronger and more systematic approach to risk detection. Our very close collaboration also enables us to leverage them as an extension of our team.”
Julien Lézé, Fintech Investor at Speedinvest, says: “Banks and fintechs already face high costs from large compliance teams and increasing regulatory scrutiny. As AI drives an exponential rise in the volume and sophistication of fraud, compliance operations cannot scale proportionally. The only viable path forward for financial institutions is to fight fire with fire – AI with AI.”
