Footprint closed a $25 million Series B led by QED Investors, with support from MUFG and others, to expand its agentic AI platform Percy and Trust Fabric for financial crime compliance at banks and fintechs, while doubling engineering and sales teams and opening a San Francisco office.
Footprint, the AI operating system for risk and financial crime compliance, raised $25 million in Series B funding. The round was led by QED Investors, with participation from MUFG, Commerce Ventures, LightBank, and Alumni Ventures, plus continued support from existing investors Index Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, BoxGroup, Operator Partners, and Animal Capital.
What is One Footprint Inc.?
Founded in 2022 in New York by CEO and co-founder Eli Wachs (Stanford graduate, former General Atlantic technology investor focused on security/privacy/identity, serial entrepreneur) and CTO/co-founder Alex Grinman (MIT cryptography background, co-founder of Krypt.co acquired by Akamai), Footprint began as an identity verification and secure PII vault platform. It unified KYC, authentication, and data vaulting for low friction, high accuracy onboarding, emphasizing portable verified identities and reducing fraud through a network of authentic, de-duplicated identities rather than solely screening bad actors.
Early funding included a ~$6 million seed in August 2022 (led by Index Ventures) and a Series A of ~$13–20 million in April 2024 (led by QED). Total capital raised across rounds is reported around $45–51 million. The company has evolved from primarily onboarding/identity tools into a full agentic AI platform for end to end risk and compliance operations.
Employees are in the range of ~36 (with plans to expand significantly). It holds certifications including SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001.
Product Focus: Percy and Trust Fabric
The Series B centers on scaling Percy, described as the first end to end agentic AI operating system purpose built for financial crime compliance, and Trust Fabric, the governed infrastructure underneath it.
- Percy investigates cases, surfaces findings, and executes standard operating procedures (SOPs) at the speed and precision of an expert analyst. It works in plain English (no coding required for queries, reasoning requests, or new workflows), reviews more data sources, and produces fully auditable outputs with citations, timestamps, and task by task trails suitable for regulators. It covers AML, enhanced due diligence (EDD), KYC/KYB, transaction monitoring, sanctions, adverse media, watchlist screening, and related workflows. Performance claims include resolving watchlist alerts in under a minute (vs. ~30 minutes previously), completing EDD in under 15 minutes (vs. ~3 hours), reviewing ~4x more data sources, automating ~90% of Level 1 reviews, and operating ~20x faster than human analysts in certain scenarios while collecting more evidence.
- Trust Fabric builds a compounding “organizational memory.” Insights and precedents from one investigation become instantly available across KYC, sanctions, monitoring, and other functions. It connects related signals to surface fraud rings and repeat actors that siloed human reviews might miss. Every memory carries provenance. The model is “agents propose; humans approve.” It includes agent assurance capabilities that continuously check policy adherence, evidence use, and decision consistency, giving QA teams full traceability.
The platform is pre integrated with hundreds of data sources and vendors (e.g., LexisNexis, ComplyAdvantage, government registries). It is designed for banks and fintechs facing rising volumes of AI enabled crime (synthetic identities, sophisticated laundering) while traditional tools remain rules based, siloed, and backlog prone.
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Proceeds will roughly double engineering and sales headcount, accelerate R&D on Percy and Trust Fabric, and support opening a San Francisco office to expand West Coast presence and better serve large enterprise financial institutions.
The core thesis, articulated by Wachs: risk operations must be re-envisioned for an AI native era. As generative AI increases the scale and sophistication of financial crime (global illicit activity cited as rising ~$1.3 trillion since 2023 to ~$4.4 trillion; U.S./Canada institutions alone spend >$60 billion annually on compliance), institutions need scalable agentic defense systems that learn programs, execute end to end, and compound institutional knowledge rather than relying on fixed rules or manual triage.
Customers include FDIC- and OCC regulated banks plus fintechs such as Bilt, Nuvei, and MoonPay. The technology helps clear alert backlogs faster with deeper context. Early product history included traction with banking as a service and fintech platforms (e.g., Treasury Prime, Apiture in prior stages).
The raise positions Footprint in the high growth intersection of generative/agentic AI and regulated financial crime compliance, a domain under pressure from both escalating threats and regulatory expectations for auditability, consistency, and efficiency. By combining natural language agentic execution with governed memory and human oversight, the company differentiates from legacy rules engines, pure point solutions, or black box AI tools. Investor composition (fintech specialists like QED and Commerce Ventures, strategic capital from MUFG, and continuity from Index and others) signals confidence in product market fit within banking and fintech risk operations.
The $25 million Series B marks a clear shift from identity/onboarding foundations to scaling an AI native compliance operating system, with capital directed at talent, product depth, and geographic expansion to capture demand from institutions confronting AI amplified financial crime.
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