SAN FRANCISCO — 17/02/2026 — Sphinx, the company building browser-native compliance agents for financial institutions, today announced it has raised a $7.1 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Deel Ventures, and Singularity Capital. The funding will be used to scale Sphinx’s agentic compliance workforce as banks and fintechs increasingly rely on it for core AML, KYC, and KYB operations.
Unlike traditional RegTech software, Sphinx does not ask teams to adopt another system. Its agents work directly inside the tools institutions already use, including case management systems, third-party portals, PDFs, email, and internal dashboards, to perform the work of a human compliance analyst. Agents review alerts, conduct AML and KYB checks, gather supporting research, draft RFIs, and capture their reasoning in a complete, regulator-ready audit trail. Teams typically go live in days, without integrations or system replacements.
“Compliance today is mostly human glue between systems that were never designed to work together,” said Alexandre Berkovic, Co-Founder and CEO. “Sphinx takes on that work directly so analysts can focus on the judgment calls — and institutions finally get a complete, defensible record of how every decision was made.”
Sphinx’s browser-native architecture has allowed it to operate globally from day one, adapting to different workflows and regulatory requirements across more than a dozen regions. Customers include banks, public companies, and fast-growing fintechs that use Sphinx to eliminate manual review work, reduce backlogs, and scale operations without hiring additional analysts.
“Sphinx isn’t just a software, it’s critical operational infrastructure that meets teams where they are: in their systems, procedures, and day-to-day reality,” said Filip Dames, Founding Partner at Cherry Ventures. “Very few products can function inside that level of complexity. That’s what’s driving such rapid adoption across banks and fintechs.”
In production, Sphinx agents have already handled millions of alerts and hundreds of thousands of cases, clearing months-long backlogs in days. Customers report dramatic reductions in manual reviews, faster onboarding, and materially lower exposure to compliance errors and fines. Equals Money saw a 94% reduction in false positives while catching more true positives, and several institutions now operate internationally without expanding compliance headcount, cutting operational costs by up to 4x.
Sphinx seeks to tackle the $200B+ spent every year on compliance teams and outsourced review houses doing work software was never built to do. Institutions don’t need another dashboard, they need the work done.
Sphinx reflects the backgrounds of its founders, Alexandre Berkovic and Chrisjan Wüst, and the team they’ve brought together. Chrisjan built AML and onboarding infrastructure for 15M+ users as the first employee at RelyComply, while Alex specialized in AI research at Imperial and MIT. This is their second company together, following a prior exit. Sphinx’s early team includes ex-operators, PhDs, and former compliance officers from global banks.
About Sphinx
Sphinx builds customizable, browser-native intelligent agents that run on top of existing systems to automate compliance operations end-to-end, with no engineering work required. Every decision is logged and explainable by design, making automated compliance auditable, scalable, and ultimately insurable. Sphinx works with large banks, global fintechs, and neobanks to eliminate manual reviews, reduce operational risk, and enable fast, compliant expansion across markets.
