Parcha raises $5M to intelligently automate compliance and operations

Introducing Parcha

In 2020, we led the Platform Team at Brex and were given the challenge of scaling the customer base 10X in a year by making onboarding, compliance, risk management and underwriting more automated. Despite 200+ people working on this problem there were still many workflows that required humans in the loop. That’s because certain workflows like onboarding and enhanced due diligence for higher customers, and custom underwriting for certain business sectors required human expertise and judgment.

It was our experience at Brex and Coinbase before it, that helped us realize the need for a better solution to automating operations. One that has human-level expertise and judgement, can adapt to changing business needs and can easily be leveraged by operations teams without technical resources.

Today we’re launching Parcha to solve this problem. At Parcha, we’re building enterprise-grade AI Agents that instantly automate manual workflows in compliance and operations using existing policies, procedures and tools. We are building a platform that will make it possible for any business to create AI Agents to intelligently automate repetitive manual processes, removing bottlenecks and empowering businesses to scale, starting with Fintech.

$5M Seed Funding

We’re excited to share that Parcha has raised $5 million in funding from investors including Steve Jang and Kanyi Maqubela at Kindred Ventures who led our pre-seed and Brett Gibson at Initialized Capital who led our seed round.

We are also grateful to Propel, Fin Capital, Liquid2 Ventures, Comma Capital, CapitalX, Popular Impact Fund and many angel investors, among them Garry Tan, President of Y Combinator; Guy Podjamy, Founder of Snyk; Amit Agarwal, President of Datadog; Ameet Patel, ex-CTO of JP Morgan Chase; Zach Abrams, CEO of Bridge.xyz; Aldo Briano, Co-Founder Yiftee; Jude Gomila, CEO of Golden; Cailen Dsa, COO of Neo.Tax, Moonbase fund; Momo Ong, CEO of HeadsUp; Henrique Dubugras (Co-CEO), Michael Tannenbaum (COO), Cosmin Nicolescu (CTO), and Marco Mahrus (SVP of Business Development) of Brex.

Our First Customers

The first market we’re focused on with Parcha is fintech and banking. There are over 25,000 fintech companies globally and over 10,000 in the US with revenues in fintech expected to grow to $1.5 trillion by 2030. As fintech companies, their operations and compliance teams are often bogged down with time-consuming, repetitive manual workflows. This puts a ceiling on customer growth. Parcha’s AI agents are digital employees that can take over these repetitive workflows, supercharging operations teams and giving human employees bandwidth to do higher leverage work. Our agents can review documents, extract data, make decisions, and complete workflows end-to-end.

Parcha is currently working with a handful of early beta customers in payments, lending, banking, and crypto to automate their operations and compliance workflows. One of our customers is Bridge.xyz, an early stage startup that provides APIs to easily move money in and out of stablecoins. They are using a Parcha AI Agent to reduce the manual work required to onboard businesses onto their platform.

"Parcha's AI agent will allow us to dramatically scale our compliance ops, giving us a competitive edge in accuracy, speed, and cost." - Eric Weingarten, Chief Legal Officer & Chief Compliance Officer at Bridge.xyz.

We’re also helping Brex automate a number of manual workflows in their operations team using our AI Agents:

“At Brex, we're excited to partner with Parcha to not only unlock the massive improvements that AI brings to the customer experience, but also to our operational efficiency. ” - Michael Tannenbaum, COO & CFO of Brex

Here are some more examples of manual workflows companies are excited to automate with Parcha’s AI Agents:

• Know Your Business compliance reviews during onboarding
• Suspicious Activity Report narrative writing and filing
• Income verification from bank statements and pay slips
• Transaction categorization from credit card merchant data
• Requests for information from customers for enhanced due diligence

We see an incredible opportunity to transform how knowledge work gets done in industries beyond fintech too such as banking, healthcare, insurance and lending where human-level judgement and expertise is required to understand and execute complex policies and procedures.

Why Now?

Parcha is uniquely positioned to capitalize on three trends:

1. Enterprise companies are focused on growing more efficiently and reaching profitability in the current macroeconomic climate.
2. The rapid advances in AI that enable autonomous agents using chain-of-thought reasoning to carry out complex multi-step tasks.
3. The availability of state-of-the-art open source language models that can be fine-tuned for  enterprise use cases where data privacy is a priority.

Parcha’s AI Agents enable businesses to scale compliance and operations at a fraction of the cost of today’s solutions. Our platform makes it easy for a compliance or operations manager to create AI Agents with domain expertise instantly using existing policies, procedures and tools, without the need for technical resources. Our approach of building a platform that can either use proprietary LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude or open-source LLMs like Llama 2, gives enterprises the security, data privacy, and controls needed to deploy AI Agents and scale.

Why Us?

We have over a decade of experience building AI/ML-powered products and leading product, engineering at early stage, hyper growth and public companies. We have a deep technical understanding of applied AI, machine learning and how to build and deploy products at enterprise scale.

AJ built the world’s first real-time search engine in 2009, which was later acquired by Google where he worked on AI-powered features in Google Photos. He then joined Coinbase where he led the Data Product Team across risk, compliance, blockchain analytics, machine learning and data governance before joining Brex as Director of Product.

Miguel left his PHD at University of Maryland to join Twitter where he led research on real-time data visualizations of global events. He went on to become Twitter’s Head of Global Data Science of more than 60 data scientist across US, Europe and Asia. At Brex Miguel held roles as Head of Data, Head of Platform Engineering and led the Office of the CTO.

Join Us On Our Mission

We are just getting started on our mission to eliminate manual bottlenecks and empower businesses to scale. If you are interested in exploring how Parcha can help your business scale or are excited about building the future of automation we’re hiring a full-stack, frontend and applied AI engineer.

To learn more or request a demo, visit our website: www.parcha.ai