Israeli-founded startup IVIX has secured $60 million in fresh capital to help governments and law enforcement agencies detect and fight money laundering and other financial crimes with its artificial intelligence-powered software platform.
The Series B funding round was led by O.G. Venture Partners (OGVP), founded and backed by Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer. Venture capital funds from Insight Partners, Citi Ventures, Team8, Disruptive AI, Cardumen Capital, and Cerca also joined the financing round. To date, IVIX has raised a total of $85 million from investors.
Founded in 2020 by security experts and tech industry veterans Mattan Fattal and Doron Passov, IVIX is the developer of a software platform for financial law enforcement agencies that leverages artificial intelligence to spot financial crimes, such as money laundering, sanctions evasion and tax non-compliance. The startup says it has helped government agencies in the US, Europe, and Asia find “billions of dollars” in offshore assets and illicit financial activity.
“For decades, publicly available data has been underutilized in combating complex financial crime due to its scattered, opaque nature and challenges in deriving actionable insights,” said IVIX’s CEO Fattal. “By assembling top-tier tech talent, investing in focused research, and leveraging the new era of large language models (LLMs) combined with modern graph algorithms…we embraced this mission.”
“This is the most complex technology I’ve ever worked on,” he added.
The startup employs about 60 people, most of them at its R&D center in Tel Aviv, with the rest in the US, Europe, South America, and Asia.
Team at AI fintech startup IVIX. (Courtesy)
IVIX’s software scans the internet for signs of anomalies and illicit financial activity using LLMs and advanced graph analytics to sift through and analyze rafts of publicly available business data.
The platform also gathers information from cryptocurrency networks, high-speed micro-transactions, blockchain, and global e-commerce marketplaces, to help users identify hidden connections and uncover financial crime and criminal networks that traditional manual methods deployed by financial investigators and auditors often miss.
Law enforcement agencies, including tax authorities, have long investigated traditional methods of evasion, such as shell companies, offshore accounts, and layered money laundering schemes. But the fast advancement of the digital age, giving rise to sophisticated cryptocurrency networks, anonymity and pseudonymity in blockchain, and global e-commerce, is making it more challenging and time-consuming for financial investigators to detect complex fraud schemes.
Illicit activity in these industries and many others has resulted in a $20 trillion global untaxed shadow economy that operates largely beyond the reach of traditional investigative methods, according to data by Statista.
Fattal said that the proceeds of the funding round will be used to advance research into the startup’s software and “help more authorities around the world stay ahead of the rapidly evolving shadow economy.” In addition, IVIX plans to more than double its workforce to 150 employees in less than a year.
