Monnai, a California-based startup founded just one year ago, had completed a pre-seed round in late 2021 with 500 Global, EMVC and Ginkgo Ventures. They participated in a $3.15 million seed round led by Better Tomorrow Ventures in late September, which was also joined by Commerce Ventures, Kearny Jackson and 9Yards Capital. The total amount raised by the company to date is over $4M. With this latest funding, the company intends to accelerate the development of its platform and recruit to expand into the global market.
The development of new technologies, especially AI, has generated new challenges, opportunities and risks: increased cybercrime and fraud, emerging data regulations… While businesses lack the data they need to grow securely, nearly half of the world’s population lacks sufficient access to credit, something Monnai aims to change.
Founded by Pierre Demarche, CEO and Ravish Patel, CPO, based in San Francisco, with offices in India and Singapore, Monnai leverages AI to provide an infrastructure that connects disparate data sources via a single API, so that fintechs can focus on growth.
Pierre Demarche explains:
“In a digitally driven world, every business is a fintech. While these innovations have global scale and applicability, the infrastructure that supports them is fragmented and siloed. To grow, companies need to leverage and consolidate better technologies and data into the same platform, offering a ubiquitous approach to decision models.”
Monnai therefore aims to provide a global infrastructure to power fintech decision making at scale. To that end, the platform leverages more than 500 aggregated and normalized insights across an ecosystem of identity, digital, communications, device and payments data partners.
In order for fintechs to make fair and transparent decisions, while understanding and trusting the decisions made by AI, Monnai was built with an explainable AI (XAI) model. The output is displayed on an interface designed to make the process transparent to credit analysts, data scientists or product managers.
The API allows fintechs to make a decision based on different criteria:
- KYC (Know Your Customer) compliance that verifies customer identity and address, which banks use to prevent money laundering and financial fraud, among other things;
- Credit decision: alternative data and analysis to unlock financial equality;
- Trust and fraud risk: customer information helps identify trusted users while preventing next-generation fraud, such as identity theft;
- Collection optimization: data and insights to improve collection processes and increase recovery rates.
According to the company, its API is used by major financial institutions in five markets in Latin America and Asia and currently provides information on more than 3 billion consumers in India, Southeast Asia and Latin America.
The API takes less than a week to deploy, with customers having access to consumer identity and behavior data in real time. In addition, 85% of users were identified as trusted users which increased approval rates. In addition, 99% of fraudulent identities could be detected, saving fintechs money.
Translated from IA explicable : MONNAI lève 3,15 millions de dollars pour une infrastructure mondiale d’informations aux fintech
