Unit21

Unit21, based in San Francisco, is an agentic AI platform for fraud and anti money laundering operations, rebuilt around AI agents that execute financial crime investigations end to end rather than just assisting analysts. Founded in 2018 by chief executive Trisha Kothari and co founder Clarence Chio on the premise that risk and compliance teams should not need engineers to build fraud and AML rules, it raised ninety two million dollars from Tiger Global, Google's Gradient Ventures, and ICONIQ, and serves more than two hundred customers including Intuit, Chime, and Green Dot. In March 2026 it relaunched as AI Risk Infrastructure, positioning itself as a leader in agentic AI for financial crime after rebuilding its platform from the ground up.

Rather than summarizing alerts, Unit21's agents perform the work. On a unified fraud and AML data model, out of the box agents run the full lifecycle across transaction monitoring, real time fraud prevention, sanctions screening, know your transaction, enhanced due diligence, check and ACH fraud, account takeover, case management, and suspicious activity report filing. An agent ingests an alert, pulls transaction histories, checks sanctions lists, reviews adverse media, assembles evidence, drafts a regulator ready narrative in the customer's format, and logs every step for audit, with each agent configured to that institution's standard operating procedures, thresholds, and risk appetite rather than a generic model. Critically, the AI does not only review alerts, it also creates new detection logic, recommending optimized rules from patterns across dispositions, and teams can validate models and rules with backtesting and shadow mode against historical or live data before deploying. Every run is human supervised, shows its work, and improves from analyst decisions and outcomes over time. Customers report false positive reductions up to ninety three percent and investigation time cut up to eighty percent.

Unit21 is built for the regulated realities of banks, fintechs, and crypto companies, where defensibility, auditability, and governance are non negotiable, and it deliberately contrasts itself with copilots that summarize and standalone tools that lack the underlying risk infrastructure. It runs as a cloud platform without a documented on premise option, uses its own models rather than a choice of provider, and acts through data and integrations rather than driving a browser. For a risk or compliance team drowning in alerts that wants agents to execute investigations and filings while keeping full regulatory defensibility, Unit21 is a strong and proven fit; a team wanting a self hosted deployment or a general purpose agent builder will find it purpose built for financial crime.