Jan 24, 2023
Sandbar is thrilled to announce our $4.8 million seed round. The round was led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures, with participation from BoxGroup and 45+ angel investors. Our angel investors include founders, early employees, and executives of Ramp, Stripe, Square, Plaid, and more. This round allows us to improve the product, introduce it to a broader audience, and support more partners. This is a big milestone for Sandbar and the risk professionals we work to serve every day.
The idea for Sandbar is simple: create institutional-grade AML systems without the institutional-grade setup.
Throughout the global financial system, anti-money laundering (AML) professionals deal with a fractured ecosystem of solutions. Far too many AML professionals are hindered by their tools. A lack of sufficient tooling leads to false positives and inefficient manual processes. Alerting systems often have false positive rates of over 90%, and investigating these alerts can often be more of an exercise in aggregating data than in applying expertise. This was the experience of our co-founder and CCO Brandon in his seven years at JPMC.
A 2011 report by the United Nations notes that an estimated $2–4T is laundered every year, yet less than 1% of laundered money is identified correctly. Despite this poor track record, the US alone is spending over $35B on AML efforts. This is not okay; doing better can help cut off funding for kidnappers, human traffickers, terrorists, and other criminals. Our proprietary technology combined with our expertise can help risk teams do better by providing the foundation of an effective AML program.
The idea for Sandbar is simple: create institutional-grade AML systems without the institutional-grade setup. We provide an activity monitoring solution that is flexible and can cover the entirety of your product offerings. The product grows with you, from your first transaction to your IPO. Our calculation engine analyzes many types and sources of data including KYC data, transactional data, and watchlists to paint a full picture of entity risk across products. By alleviating hours of extraneous work with our surgical risk models and intelligent aggregation system, we can empower investigators to find the criminals hiding among their users.
Sandbar has created an out-of-the-box experience that allows even the smallest teams can take advantage of our product. Most clients can get data flowing in days, not months by taking advantage of our data connectors that handle much of the integration process for them. We provide our clients with packages of rules catered to their specific business needs based on our decades of expertise, both in-house and amongst our network of AML professionals. The system not only assesses risk but also provides prepackaged cases with all the context needed to effectively assess risk quickly.
Sandbar’s accuracy, immediacy of alerts, automated suggestions and built-in education allow companies of all sizes to scale their AML efforts with less and avoid costly penalties — all within one, cohesive solution.
Since closing the round, we’ve focused on building a complimentary suite of tooling on top of our high-powered activity monitoring system. Our clients can manage investigations based on our insights, screen users and counterparties against various watchlists, prepare SARs, view metrics about their analysts and their program, and do much more in the application. To continue our rapid product development, we have doubled the size of our team, growing from 4 to 8 people. We have also onboarded our first live client and signed contracts with more. Every day we aim to improve our product and experience for our clients.
We are excited by the support we’ve received and the updates we have in the pipeline. We can’t wait to bring more clients into the Sandbar family, serve more AML teams, and continue building something that changes the AML landscape.