On February 17, 2026, Sphinx secured a seed funding round worth USD 7.1 million to scale its AI-enabled compliance agents for financial institutions.
This funding was spearheaded by Cherry Ventures with additional support from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Deel Ventures, and Singularity Capital. The funds will be used to expand the company’s agentic compliance workforce, which serves banks and fintech companies in AML, KYC, and KYB operations.
Sphinx develops browser-native agents that can operate within existing institutional tools such as case management systems, third-party portals, documents, email, and internal dashboards. These agents perform tasks like conducting AML and KYB checks, reviewing alerts, collecting supporting research, drafting requests for information, and creating audit trails without necessitating system replacements or integrations. Institutions can typically deploy the technology within a few days.
Agentic AI streamlines compliance operations
Alexandre Berkovic, Co-Founder and CEO of Sphinx, commented that today’s compliance operations mainly involve manual processes between systems not designed to work together. Sphinx automates these processes, allowing analysts to focus on judgment-based decisions while ensuring institutions maintain complete and defensible records of every compliance decision.
The browser-native architecture allows global deployment across various regions, adapting to different workflows and regulatory requirements. Customers include banks, public companies, and fintech firms that use the platform to reduce manual review workloads, clear alert backlogs, and scale operations without additional hiring.
In production deployments, Sphinx agents have processed millions of alerts and hundreds of thousands of cases, according to company data. Several institutions operate internationally without expanding their compliance teams, achieving operational cost reductions of up to four times.
Market positioning in compliance technology
Global compliance spending exceeds USD 200 billion annually across internal teams and outsourced review operations. Sphinx aims to automate manual review tasks that are traditionally handled by human analysts.
Filip Dames, Founding Partner at Cherry Ventures, highlighted that Sphinx functions as critical operational infrastructure, integrating seamlessly into existing systems and procedures. Few products can operate effectively in such a complex environment, driving rapid adoption among banks and fintech companies.
Sphinx competes with compliance automation providers like Chainalysis, Sardine, ComplyAdvantage, and established regtech platforms. The co-founders, Alexandre Berkovic and Chrisjan Wüst, previously built AML and onboarding infrastructure for over 15 million users before founding Sphinx.
