TEL AVIV, Israel & NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Ballerine, an open-source risk decisioning platform, has raised $5 Million in a seed funding round led by Team8. The company provides an open-source platform that integrates global data sources, along with the necessary tools to automate and enhance decision-making processes for tasks such as onboarding (KYB), underwriting, and transaction monitoring. Ballerine caters to any business handling financial transactions subjected to KYB, KYC, and anti-money laundering regulations, including most financial institutions, FinTechs, e-commerce, marketplaces, and other businesses. Ballerine is experiencing rapid growth and traction, its open-source GitHub repository has attracted over 1500 developers worldwide, with dozens of fintech companies using its code in production.
The company was founded by an expert team of developers from the digital banking space with extensive experience building in-house risk infrastructure, and a first-hand understanding of the many challenges associated with developing and maintaining risk systems internally. The founding team, Noam Izhaki (CEO), Nitzan Guy (CPO), and Alon Peretz (CTO), launched Ballerine to solve the pain points they encountered using a developer-first, open-source and modular approach.
Traditionally, verifying, underwriting and monitoring businesses is a complex task. It involves extensive data pulling from multiple sources, documentation, and policy updates due to changes in regulations, threats, and best practices. This complexity increases exponentially as companies expand to new geographies or add new products and business lines. Ballerine simplifies this task, enabling developers to fully customize their risk assessment workflow through a marketplace of point solutions. Data sources can be accessed via a single commercial agreement with Ballerine or through commercialization directly with data vendors. These sources include but are not limited to: company registries, sanctions, websites/social, credit agencies, adverse media, PEP databases, UBO registries and Open-Banking.
“The financial industry desperately needs infrastructure to support its ongoing digital transformation, infrastructure that empowers institutions to automatically access and analyze data throughout the customer journey,” said Noam Izhaki, the CEO and Co-Founder of Ballerine, “Ballerine offers exactly that – it leverages dispersed data, simplifies privacy management, and empowers companies to continually enhance their risk-decisioning processes while maintaining control and flexibility.”
Ballerine’s open-source core gives developers and risk managers control over the infrastructure with a single integration and allows customization to address specific needs around customer experience, risk exposures, audiences, and geographies. Ballerine’s open-source platform is the next-gen infrastructure for risk and identity decisioning as it offers significantly more flexibility for global financial services and large institutions, catering to many more use cases and leaving more room for customers to extend and customize the platform.
“Ballerine has a real opportunity to transform the way any business handling financial transactions manages risk.” said Hadar Siterman Norris, Partner at Team8. “This funding will help Ballerine create the first open-source and developer-centric compliance infrastructure, which is sure to propel Ballerine to even greater heights. We are excited to be part of their journey.”
The funding round was led by Team8 with participation from Y Combinator, Vera Equity and executives from Brex, Trulioo, Venmo, Melio and Coinbase. Ballerine and Team8 will be attending Money 20/20 in Amsterdam, June 6-8, 2023. Noam Izhaki, Ballerine’s CEO and Co-Founder, will be speaking at the conference during a presentation, “Open-Source is Coming: Watch Out Financial Services.” To learn more about Ballerine, visit: www.ballerine.com.
About Ballerine
Ballerine is an open-source platform that enables businesses offering financial products and services to verify and underwrite their customers globally or at scale. Their technology provides developers and risk managers with maximum control over compliance infrastructure with a single integration, and can be easily customized to address specific needs around customer experience, risk exposures, audiences, and geographies. Ballerine caters to any business handling financial transactions that are subject to KYB/KYC and money laundering regulations. This includes nearly all financial institutions and fintechs, as well as many eCommerce, marketplaces and SaaS companies. For more information, visit https://www.ballerine.com/
About Team8
Team8 is a venture group that builds and invests in the most innovative technologies in the fields of fintech, cyber, data, and digital health. We leverage deep domain expertise, cutting-edge technology, and first-hand company-building experience to partner with entrepreneurs in founding globally-successful companies, while also investing in early-stage companies that are active in the Group’s fields of interest. Visit www.team8.vc to learn more.
