Our investment in Acuminor — to fuel the battle against financial crime

I’m thrilled to announce our investment in Acuminor, a Sweden based RegTech company fighting financial crime. As such, I thought I’d take the time to elaborate a bit on the rationale behind our investment and why we believe Acuminor is a crucial part in shaping a better version of the future.

But first let’s get the details out of the way. Acuminor has raised a pre-A-round of SEK 19 million led by Zenith with participation from Edastra and existing shareholders. With an impressive growth during 2021, despite Covid-19, reaching 20 customers in 13 countries, and revenues of c.SEK 8 million, the company is now set to accelerate growth further before raising an A-round.

Surely no one has missed the constant flood of news headlines on banks breaching AML regulations. And we should probably get used to it. As terrorist financing and money laundering is increasing by the minute so is the regulatory pressure, with significant fines and reputational threats often among the consequences. The gradient is rising in the already uphill battle against financial crime. Not only is this a battle against financial crime, but also a subsequent resource battle as the companies are facing higher costs and increased complexity to meet compliance obligations, leaving them to focus on compliance rather than innovation. Regulated businesses face an immediate risk but pretty much all companies are affected in terms of business risk and reputational risk, which for example became apparent last week as Ericsson’s suspected IS-bribes put a wet blanket over the stock which plummeted.

So how should the companies handle the growing challenge? Well, the current working methods, dominated by manual, cost heavy processes should not be an option. Instead, digital solutions that drastically increase efficiency, reduce cost, add scalability and at the same time ensure quality is the way forward — and this is where Acuminor come in to play.

Founded in 2018 Acuminor has positioned itself as a leading SaaS company for financial crime intelligence. With a long list of blue chip customers there’s no doubt Acuminor is here to revolutionize and lead to way in fighting the battle. Existing customers have estimated that what previously took several months do accomplish, can now be reduced to seconds, implying millions in cost savings which surely should be cheered on by the shareholders.

So why will Acuminor become a RegTech winner? In addition to the superior product, let’s take a look at the team. Led by Martin Nordh, a former police officer, also educated lawyer and with several years of experience from financial crime having led the Financial Crime Risk and Controls operations at a leading Nordic bank and hand-picked his co-founders with complementing skills but similar sector backgrounds it is safe to say that it’s a passionate and experienced team. But above all, it’s also a team that authentically came across this problem, having experienced it firsthand at previous jobs. Needless to say, the team has impressed us.

“We are now leaving the launch pad and are on our way up through the atmosphere. It is a fantastic privilege to have such experienced investors on our journey.”

Martin Nordh, CEO Acuminor

To round things up, let’s just say that Zenith is a very proud backer of Acuminor. We are excited to support the next part of the journey and together working towards the #16th SDG “Peace, justice and strong institutions”