WorkFusion, a startup that has developed AI agents for financial crime compliance, has raised $45 million in funding, the company told Crunchbase News exclusively.

Founded in 2010 out of MIT Labs, New York-based WorkFusion pivoted a few years ago from general automation and intelligent document processing to focus on its AI agents for financial crime compliance, according to CEO Adam Famularo.

Originally, WorkFusion “was trying to automate pretty much anything for anybody,” he said.

“It would use any one of its baseline technologies to do that work. But the problem was that you can’t scale something like that,” Famularo recalls. “It wasn’t really, truly productized.”

So when Famularo came on board in 2021, the company surveyed all of its customers and discovered that the most successful use cases were around fighting financial crimes.

Famularo said the company “wound up doing a deal with five banks” after he persuaded the WorkFusion team to consolidate their existing machine learning models. These models were then packaged as AI agents, and given specific names and job roles, to simplify the hiring process for banks.

WorkFusion officially launched the agents in February 2022. “That was the rebirth of the company,” Famularo said.

Agents trained for the job

The agents, he added, come “out-of-the-box trained” with up to five years of experience in a specific job. WorkFusion is betting that financial institutions would rather not spend the time to build their own agents.

“Our AI Agents are easy to hire, easy to configure, easy to integrate and easy to scale,” Famularo said in an interview. “We view our purpose as to help stop the bad actors.”

The agents perform job functions such as sanctions screening alert review, adverse media monitoring, transaction monitoring investigations, onboarding, Know Your Customer refresh, enhanced due diligence/high risk review, and fraud alert review.

Besides saving banks time, WorkFusion claims that its agentic AI for financial crime compliance is also cheaper than hiring or outsourcing and are performing work “consistently and accurately,” with compliance with policy and regulations “significantly strengthened.”

Clients and investors

Georgian, a growth-stage B2B investor that aims to help companies scale faster via its AI Lab, tripled down on its investment by leading WorkFusion’s latest round.

Serengeti Asset Management, a previous backer that had sold its stake, came back in to participate in the financing. It was joined by Famularo,  NGP Capital, Teralys Capital, Hawk Equity and a host of others.

With the latest funding round, WorkFusion has raised a total of $251 million in equity in various primary transactions to fund its operations, Famularo said. It has also raised about $90 million in secondary transactions in which investors paid to purchase shares from other shareholders.

Today, WorkFusion has 25 customers, including 10 of the top 20 banks in the United States and other “top” financial institutions around the world. Some examples include Raymond James, Valley Bank, Bank of Montreal and Deutsche Bank. The company operates in North America and Europe and plans to expand into the Middle East.

“We took this business from zero to $22 million in ARR over the past four years,” Famularo said. “And we expect that to grow 60% to 70% a year.”

WorkFusion has no debt, according to Famularo, and has “a line of sight of profitability.” It has fewer than 200 employees, and plans to use its new capital in part to do strategic hiring.

Justin Lafayette, co-founder of Georgian, describes WorkFusion as “a unifying technology layer” for many of the world’s leading financial institutions.

“It has shown it can evolve quickly to meet these institutions’ needs,” he told Crunchbase News via email. “We believe the re-launch of the company in 2022 focusing on AI Agents for financial crime is an example of the right product, at the right time, from the right company.”

Ray Yousefian, senior managing director, of Serengeti Asset Management, noted that as his firm started to look deep into the product and speaking to customers, it “quickly became one of the clearest use cases of advanced agentic AI that is able to be deployed quickly and providing enormous value to clients.”

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Illustration: Dom Guzman