Sphinx

Sphinx develops AI agents that carry out the work of compliance analysts at banks, fintechs, crypto platforms and public companies. The agents are browser-native: rather than connecting through APIs or data exports, they log into the case management systems, corporate registries, sanctions databases, third-party portals and internal dashboards that compliance teams already use, navigating interfaces, extracting and reconciling data, and executing investigative steps in sequence. The company positions this as addressing an execution problem rather than a software problem, arguing that traditional RegTech added dashboards and outsourcing added headcount without removing the underlying manual work.

The product covers the compliance lifecycle from onboarding through reporting. Advertised capabilities include alert review and investigations, AML, KYC and KYB checks, identity verification, continuous watchlist monitoring and re-screening, website and adverse media analysis, document intelligence, UBO mapping, address verification, transaction monitoring, dispute resolution using logs, emails and on-chain data, drafting of RFIs and case narratives, and filing of structured SAR/UAR reports. Sphinx states that agents operate through a proprietary Interpretable Agentic Framework with policy-aware reasoning, documented investigative steps and audit trails intended to be defensible in audits, regulatory reviews and model risk governance. It reports SOC 2 Type II certification and GDPR compliance, and maintains human oversight through analyst review of edge cases and high-risk decisions, feedback loops and QA-driven refinement of decision logic.

The founding team consists of CEO Alexandre Berkovic and CTO Chrisjan Wüst. Berkovic previously co-founded Adorno AI, which built audio generation models for video, and studied Design Engineering at Imperial College and machine learning at MIT. Wüst co-founded and sold Adorno AI and was previously Head of Engineering (described elsewhere as first employee and Head of ML) at RelyComply, where he helped scale the company from $0 to $12M ARR and secured a deal with Africa's largest bank. The two met in Cape Town and later reconnected in Portugal, which led to their earlier startup together.

Founding story

Founded in 2024 by Alexandre Berkovic and Chrisjan Wüst, who first met at a barbecue in Cape Town, later became flatmates, and reconnected in Portugal two years afterwards, which led to their first startup together, Adorno AI. Wüst had seen the limitations of rule-based compliance systems firsthand at RelyComply, and the pair started Sphinx to replace those systems with AI agents that make onboarding decisions.

Business model

Sphinx sells its AI compliance agents to financial institutions as a service that deploys into customers' existing systems without integrations, engineering support or replacement of incumbent tools, with customers reported to go live in days. An internal compliance team works alongside customers as forward-deployed solutions architects, mapping standard operating procedures, validating decision logic, tuning workflows and reviewing edge cases.

Traction

Sphinx reports agents live across 8 countries and running in production with banks, fintechs, crypto platforms and public companies, having processed millions of alerts and hundreds of thousands of cases. Customer-reported outcomes include clearing months-long backlogs in days, cutting onboarding and investigation cycle times from days to minutes, up to 94% reduction in false positives with improved true positive detection, and up to 4x lower compliance operating costs. Conduit's FinCrime lead reports moving from a six-month alert review backlog to a clean queue in two days with over 1,000 alerts dispositioned. Team size was listed at 14.

Latest developments

In February 2026 Sphinx announced a $7.1M seed round led by Cherry Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Deel Ventures and Singularity Capital, to be used to scale its agentic compliance workforce as banks and fintechs adopt it for AML, KYC and KYB operations. The company said it is scaling product, team and company, and is hiring.