Baran Ozkan spent 15 months looking for software that did not exist. As head of financial-crime product at a European bank, he wanted a single tool to catch money laundering and fraud. Vendors overpromised. His own employer tried to build one in-house and failed.
So he built it himself. His startup, Flagright, has now raised a $12.5mn Series A led by Infinity Ventures, a San Francisco fund whose partners ran deals at PayPal. Sella Direct Ventures joined as a new backer, alongside existing investors Frontline Ventures and Y Combinator.
The ‘operating system’ pitch
Flagright calls itself the AI operating system for financial-crime compliance. In plain terms, it tries to replace two things at once: the legacy systems banks have run for years, and the patchwork of separate tools bolted on top.
It folds transaction monitoring, watchlist screening, risk scoring, case management and investigations into one platform. When a payment moves through a customer’s system, Flagright checks it in real time for fraud, money laundering and sanctions risk. It then hands compliance teams a result they can explain to a regulator.
