Hummingbird Lands $8.2 Million to Automate Financial Compliance Technology

Compliance hurdles from navigating how the regulation applies to fintech startups and modernizing cumbersome legacy systems challenge financial service providers, mainly as they introduce new offerings.

FREMONT, CA: Hummingbird, a San-Francisco based provider of anti-money laundering (AML) compliance technology, raised $8.2 million in its Series A funding round. Flourish Ventures led the round, with new support from Stripe alumni Lachy Groom and Jon Zieger. It also received continued support from seed investors, including Hombrew, Designer Fund, and TTV Capital, for total funding to date of $11.8 million.

Hummingbird’s products have driven efficiency gains of 80-90 percent in financial services providers’ workflows to investigate and report suspicious financial activity.

“We invested in Hummingbird since its inception because it is a business at the intersection of two important trends accelerated by the pandemic – finance embedded in all our digital experiences and the digitisation of regulation,” says Kabir Kumar, director at Flourish Ventures. “The Hummingbird team cracked the code for automation in AML where others have struggled.”

The regtech offers two main products: a case management, investigation, and reporting platform; and an application programming interface (API) for validating and filing regulatory reports. These products aim to drive down costs, improve accuracy, and automate financial compliance programs, while also facilitating collaboration and technological advancements: Hummingbird’s data organization and insights are designed for machine learning.

“Enhanced data sharing offers enormous potential in how we detect financial crime. The new funding will allow us to move forward with technologies that could improve the quality and speed of communication among institutions and leverage structured datasets, with ethical care, for machine learning,” says Hummingbird co-CEO, Joe Robinson.

“We’re grateful for the opportunity to make regulatory compliance easier and money laundering more difficult.”

Hummingbird will also use the investment to expand into new practice areas, including transaction disputes and consumer protections in lending, continuing its operational growth, and entering the European market, starting with Ireland and the UK.

It anticipates an increase in regulatory dynamics amid COVID-19 and has made preparations to support banks and other financial institutions as the industry adapts to the pandemic’s economic stressors.