Hawk, a provider of AI-based solutions for anti-money laundering (AML), fraud detection, and screening, has secured $56m in a Series C funding round.
The round was spearheaded by One Peak, with backing from existing investors such as Macquarie Capital, Rabobank, BlackFin Capital Partners, Sands Capital, DN Capital, Picus, and Coalition.
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One Peak co-founder and managing partner David Klein said: “The value that Hawk delivers to AML and fraud teams around the world is truly remarkable.
“Financial institutions of all sizes attest to Hawk’s ability to deliver impressive results, exceptional reliability and collaborative support.
“Hawk’s technology enables banks to take a much more efficient approach to fighting financial crime, and we’re very excited to be backing Hawk’s world-class team in their next leg of explosive growth.”
The newly acquired funds will fuel Hawk’s efforts in further developing its products and expanding its presence globally, with focus on the US.
Currently, Hawk has a customer base of more than 80 clients worldwide, ranging from prominent Tier 1 banks to mid-sized financial institutions and fintech firms.
Utilising AI, Hawk enables banks to move away from outdated, rules-based methods of detecting money laundering and fraud.
Traditional systems often overwhelm compliance teams with a high volume of false positives, which need to be manually reviewed, leading to costly operational inefficiencies.
Such legacy systems create major challenges for compliance departments, including the need to handle excessive numbers of false alerts. This often leads to staffing issues and escalates the cost of operations.
Hawk claims that its AI-powered technology increases detection accuracy, helping to uncover more financial crimes while minimising the number of false positives.
Hawk CEO Tobias Schweiger said: “Every financial institution that wants to reduce compliance workloads and increase the accuracy of risk detection should be using AI to achieve those goals.
“The results are compelling—we’ve been able to increase alert accuracy to almost 90% in some cases, while significantly cutting false positives.
“We’re also uncovering twice as many previously undetected cases of ‘novel’ criminal activity.”
