Hawk raises EUR 52 million in Series C for anti-money laundering AI

Munich — Follo­wing a EUR 100 million round less than a year ago, the Munich-based startup Hawk AI (“Hawk”) has announ­ced the next major round for its AI tool to combat money laun­de­ring and fraud: a large Series C round of EUR 52 million. The new funds are inten­ded to finance both the further deve­lo­p­ment of the plat­form and its global expan­sion, parti­cu­larly in the USA. — The finan­cing round was led by London-based VC One Peak, with exis­ting inves­tors Rabo­bank, Macqua­rie, Black­Fin Capi­tal Part­ners, Sands Capi­tal, DN, Picus and Coali­tion also participating. 

Accor­ding to Crunch­base, the total finan­cing volume now amounts to around 174 million euros. As recently as June 2024, the startup recei­ved 100 million dollars as part of the massive expan­sion of its Series B. 

Tobias Schwei­ger and Wolf­gang Berner foun­ded Hawk AI in Munich in 2018. More and more (neo-)banks, tradi­tio­nal finan­cial insti­tu­ti­ons and crypto compa­nies are now looking for AML (anti-money laun­de­ring) and CFT tech­no­lo­gies, i.e. when it comes to comba­ting the finan­cing of terro­rism. Hawk relies heavily on AI to screen money flows automatically. 

Hawk’s approach goes beyond the tradi­tio­nal, rule-based approach to comba­ting money laun­de­ring and fraud, which often results in huge volu­mes of false posi­tive alerts for banks that need to be manu­ally checked by compli­ance teams.

Hawk makes its tech­no­logy available to banks and fintechs and in return recei­ves soft­ware usage or license fees, depen­ding on the size of the company. This is based on the tran­sac­tion volume or the capi­tal under management. 

The tech­no­logy market for soft­ware like Hawk’s is curr­ently growing at around 20 percent per year — mainly because many insti­tu­ti­ons want or even need to replace their outda­ted systems with modern AI tech­no­logy. Hawk has been working with various forms of AI since 2018 and is constantly deve­lo­ping its models further. The next waves are the use of Gene­ra­tive AI and Agen­tic AI, which are alre­ady reco­gni­zing patterns even more accu­ra­tely and will make even better decis­i­ons in the future. 

About Hawk

Hawk’s mission is to help finan­cial insti­tu­ti­ons fight finan­cial crime more effec­tively and effi­ci­ently by using AI to detect more suspi­cious acti­vity and reduce unneces­sary alerts. www.hawk.ai