Singapore-headquartered startup Tookitaki announced today that it has closed its Series A funding round with $19.2 million in fresh funding to further boost its aim of fighting money laundering and reconciliation issues.
Tookitaki, which has offices in Singapore, India, and the US, said it raised an additional $11.7 million in funding from global investors, bringing the total size of its Series A funding to $19.2 million.
The round was co-led by Viola Fintech and SIG Asia Investment, followed by Nomura Holdings through its venture capital arm Nomura Incubation Investment Limited Partnership.
The round was also joined by the company’s existing investors including Illuminate Financial, Jungle Ventures and SEEDs Capital Pte Ltd, an investment arm of the Singapore government.
The extended Series A round allows Tookitaki to enhance its product offerings and drive technological innovation to help fuel their ongoing fight against money laundering and reconciliation issues, as well as spur business recruitment across its global offices in Singapore, India, and the U.S.
With its key offerings in the anti-money laundering (AML) and reconciliation space, Tookitaki aims to bolster its year-over-year revenue growth, which has already surpassed 300 percent over the last two years.
Tookitaki was founded by Mr. Abhishek Chatterjee, its CEO. Abhishek, who was formerly employed at JP Morgan, observed the 2008 financial crisis firsthand and noted that regulators were stricter about financial checks and balances in a bid to maintain financial stability.
However, the overall volume of digital banking and e-money transactions rose swiftly over time. Tookitaki was formed from this need to provide sustainable compliance programs in the banking and financial services industry (BFS), using technology that is powered by machine learning and distributed data-parallel architecture.
“Our vision has always been to revolutionize regulatory compliance and ensure sustainable compliance programs for every financial institution in the world. Backed by our strategic global investors, we are better placed to deliver on this vision by growing our presence significantly across the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific region,” said Abhishek Chatterjee, Founder and CEO of Tookitaki.
Tomer Michaeli, General Partner at Viola Fintech, a US$120 million cross-stage VC fund that co-invests globally in fintech companies like Actimize alongside leading VCs, will join Tookitaki’s Board of Directors.
“With almost twenty years’ experience that Viola has in the AML sector, we found Tookitaki’s approach to be very unique. Its pragmatic way of creating an overlay on top of legacy AML systems helps increase accuracy and significantly lower operating costs for financial institutions,” Michaeli said.
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Tookitaki has been a pioneer in launching explainable machine learning models in the compliance space and validating the same with global banks and reputed third-party consultants.
It recently filed a patent on explainable AI and machine learning framework and models to bring transparency into the validation process and output interpretability by banking customers and regulators.
In addition to its U.S. and Europe expansion, the company will aggressively expand its R&D team in Singapore and Bangalore, India. To drive this initiative, it has appointed Subhas Samanta, former Director at LinkedIn, as Vice President of Research and Development of Tookitaki. – © BusinessNewsAsia.com