Vega

Leverage LLMs to improve compliance teams

08 Dec

Financial institutions spent $206bn on compliance costs this year, including anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-business (KYB) reviews.

Whilst compliance tech has streamlined the process, there remain many manual checks when onboarding businesses. 85% of compliance analysts use Google for due diligence e.g. reviewing the business website.

Compliance teams face a notable productivity challenge, as McKinsey reveals that only 15% of investigators' time is actively spent on investigations. Analysts spend one day on average for each review, limited by manual processes and fragmented data.

Vega leverages LLMs to provide open source financial intelligence on businesses and complete basic compliance review tasks.

Automate - Reduce time to complete a KYB review from a few days to a few hours

Data - Build a proprietary database of SMB web presence to improve model performance

Accuracy - Finetune LLM based on proprietary data and provide sources to ensure high accuracy

Founder

Ritesh Singhania, Co-Founder & CEO - Previously fintech founder at ClearGlass (£1.2m revenue, £4m VC funding from Lakestar, Outward). MBA, University of Oxford

Timur Khamzin, Co-Founder & CPO - Previously director of Sber Bank (largest bank in Eastern Europe) and built co-pilot for accounting used by 50+ monthly users. MBA, London Business School

Spotlight Analysis

Strengths

  • Strong traction: Generated £24k revenue in less than two months of client interaction and working closely with five fintech players

  • Founder-market fit: CPO built Russia’s 1st KYC solution and the CEO has prior experience building a fintech startup (ClearGlass)

  • Proprietary database: Constantly improves as Vega grows and establishes a long-term moat by using the data to fine-tune their LLM

Weaknesses

  • Accuracy: Compliance teams have to deal with large fines if they miss potential AML/KYB concerns so the product needs to have a high accuracy

  • Crowded market: Whilst LLM use cases are new, compliance tech has a large number of new entrants

Market

Greenlite - Raised $4.8m seed round led by Greylock in January 2023

Truebiz - Raised $2.4m seed round led by Flourish Ventures in September 2022

Why Vega?

The team have found a high conviction use case of LLMs in an industry with a high level of manual entry-level tasks

Key Details

Year founded: 2023

Summary: Vega leverages LLMs to provide open source financial intelligence on businesses and complete basic compliance review tasks.

Currently raising: Yes, raising £1m

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