Accend has raised $3.2M in seed funding. The round was led by Adverb Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, General Catalyst, 645 Ventures, and angels from Brex, Stripe, and Carta. Accend has landed marquee customers in US and Europe including Slope, Pleo, Rho, Pliant and more.
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Accend helps fintechs and banks accelerate business customers’ onboarding process. Risk and Compliance teams use Accend to Onboard good customers faster, Improve operational efficiency, and Excel on compliance.
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While the fintech world continues to evolve, the industry remains tethered to manual back-office operations. The process of conducting due diligence while onboarding a new business onto a fintech or banking platform is currently painstakingly complex, excruciatingly repetitive, and – as a result – extremely prone to human error. This creates a paradox of innovation held back by tradition, led by BPO providers like Accenture (market cap: $200B+). Accend is geared to disrupt this norm by tackling the key pain points across Risk Ops and Compliance using AI.
Nick Heins, Head of Capital Markets at Slope, one of the fastest growing fintechs in the US, said, “With Accend, we were able to not only find significant time savings with over 80% reduction in manual effort required, but also provide a superior experience to our customers.”
“These shortcomings pose multiple risks. The business risk of providing a suboptimal customer experience leading to drop offs or worse, rejecting a legitimate customer leading to loss in revenue,” said Co-Founder and Co-CEO Pranjal Daga. “At the same time, the compliance risk leading to hefty penalties (eg: Coinbase’s $100M fine), legal consequences, significant damage to the company’s reputation, and even the potential loss of banking partnerships (existential crisis alert!)”
Given this founder-market fit, Accend has already been able to land marquee customers in the US and European markets. Among them is Pleo, one of the largest B2B spend management and credit card providers in Europe.
Managing Director & Co-Founder of Adverb Ventures Jessica Verrilli said, “The manual and repetitive compliance workflows within fintechs are ripe for disruption with automation. The Accend team brings a deep expertise in this area having built products at Brex and we’re excited to see them bring these insights and innovation to the broader industry.”
About Accend
Accend Founded in 2023, by Pranjal Daga and Yutong Pei, who met during their tenure at Brex leading Product and Engineering on the Fraud Risk team, the team saw an inherent need for increasing quality and efficiency in Compliance and Risk Operations, and an opportunity to do so with AI. Joining their expertise is third Co-Founder Joseph Zhou who was formerly the CFO at a mobile gaming startup. Accend’s mission is to empower financial institutions by streamlining business onboarding and enhancing compliance through automation of risk assessment and data extraction.
