Swedish company Bits has raised €12 million in a Series A round to further develop a unified European platform against fraud and money laundering, aiming to cut manual work and make it easier for regulated firms to scale across borders.
Bits is a Swedish fintech and infrastructure company founded in 2022 by former operators from Klarna, AWS and Tink. The company is building a platform that brings together onboarding, risk assessment and ongoing monitoring into one system aimed at banks and fintech companies operating across European markets.
Bits has raised €12 million in a Series A round led by Alstin Capital, with participation from Cherry Ventures, Unusual Ventures and Alliance Ventures. Haval van Drumpt, CEO of Tre Sweden, is also stepping in as an investor.
The capital will be used to increase the degree of automation in workflows related to financial crime, expand the coverage of regulatory and data sources, and scale the commercial business in key markets such as the DACH region and the UK.
Banks and fintech companies in Europe face increasing risks of fraud and money laundering while tightening regulatory attention and documentation requirements. At the same time, many players are under pressure to offer fast, fully digital customer processes, but still rely on local data providers, manual assessments and market-specific compliance setups.
This fragmentation results in slower onboarding, higher costs and significant friction when expanding into new European markets, where the compliance function often has to be built up on a country-by-country basis. Bits is positioning itself as a common European infrastructure designed to mitigate this need.
Bits offers a platform that covers the entire compliance lifecycle from onboarding and risk assessment to ongoing monitoring. With one integration, customers get access to European corporate registers, real licensee information, PEP and sanction lists as well as various fraud signals, combined with automated AML and fraud resolution and joint case management.
Unlike market-specific vendors and point solutions, the ambition is to replace entire on-premises compliance stacks with a single platform, allowing regulated businesses to scale across borders without building custom setups for each individual market.
Customers include Qliro, Alisa Bank and Walley, which use Bits to modernize their compliance processes. According to the company, Qliro has reduced manual case processing by 50-70 percent, while improving onboarding and approval times four to six times faster. What previously took weeks or months can now be conducted in days -- or in some cases hours -- where human assessment is more widely reserved for high-risk clients.
The examples illustrate how a more automated and unified approach can free up resources, while ensuring compliance requirements are met.
Bits' investors point to the fact that regulated businesses are increasingly facing what they describe as a platform challenge in compliance.
“For regulated companies, compliance is increasingly becoming a platform challenge that cannot be solved with individual tools. Bits Technology brings AML and fraud work together in one system with consistent decision-making and verifiability,” says Alexander Meyer-Scharenberg, Principal at Alstin Capital.
He cites the establishment of the EU's new regulatory body AMLA and the work on a common European AML regulatory framework as developments that will force many institutions to consider whether current compliance technology is still adequate and regulatory compliant. With the Series A round, Bits wants to position itself as part of the answer to this realignment.