How much does Variance cost?

Pricing is not published. Variance sells to financial institutions and large enterprises through direct engagement, with cloud, on-premise and air-gapped deployments, and rates are quoted rather than listed.

Does Variance have SOC 2, SSO and role based access control?

Full under the Agentic Index verification standard. Variance publishes public evidence of enterprise security and identity controls, covering a compliance posture such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001, single sign on (SSO or SAML), and role based access control (RBAC). Evidence basis: The security page pairs an attestation with controls customers use. Variance is SOC 2 Type II certified, and the page names enterprise SSO, fine-grained role-based access controls, workspace-configured retention, and immutable timestamped a. Graded from public evidence only against the Agentic Index 14 point capability taxonomy. No vendor pays for placement.

Can Variance be self hosted or run in a private VPC?

Full under the Agentic Index verification standard. Variance publishes public evidence of self hosted or private VPC deployment, along with data residency options for controlling where agent data is processed and stored. Evidence basis: Three deployment models are on offer: fully managed cloud, private VPC peering with the data staying in the customer's network, and on-premise or air-gapped with no external connectivity for the most sensitive environments, plus dedicated e. Graded from public evidence only against the Agentic Index 14 point capability taxonomy. No vendor pays for placement.

Does Variance give you tracing and observability into agent runs?

Full under the Agentic Index verification standard. Variance publishes public evidence of tracing, observability and audit logging into agent runs, so a team can see what an agent did and why. Evidence basis: Immutable, timestamped records of every agent action, decision and configuration change, ready for review, with audit logs available for every agent or human decision, direct SIEM export of decisions and logs, and every finding grounded in. Graded from public evidence only against the Agentic Index 14 point capability taxonomy. No vendor pays for placement.

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Variance

Q: Who is Variance for?

banks and financial institutions, fintechs and marketplaces, Fortune 500 compliance and fraud teams

Q: What are the best alternatives to Variance?

Based on documented capability coverage across the Agentic Index 14 point taxonomy, the closest alternatives to Variance among enterprise operations agents are Mentat, Clio, DraftWise, Legora. Each is graded on the same public evidence, and no vendor pays for placement.

Also known as: Intrinsic, intrinsicapi.com, Variance AI

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Enterprise operations agentindependentVerified 2026-09-07

Entry priceContact for pricingFull pricing detail

AI investigative agents for financial crime compliance, from the Apple fraud-engineering founders of Intrinsic: full KYC, KYB, AML and transaction-monitoring investigations returned as cited, auditable decisions in minutes under the customer's own encoded playbook, with a browsable tool marketplace, SOC 2 Type II, and cloud, VPC or fully air-gapped deployment.

Variance, based in San Francisco, builds AI investigative agents that run financial crime and compliance work end to end, replacing manual investigations that take analyst teams days. Founded in 2023 by Karine Mellata and Michael Lin, who worked on fraud engineering and machine learning at Apple and Discord, the company began as the trust and safety startup Intrinsic before focusing on financial crime, and raised a $21.5 million Series A led by Ten Eleven Ventures with 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Urban Innovation Fund and Okta Ventures, bringing total funding to $26 million.

Its agents run full investigations across KYC, KYB, AML, transaction monitoring and customer due diligence: on a triggered review they pull registration documents, trace ultimate beneficial ownership across jurisdictions and corporate layers, screen sanctions, PEP lists and adverse media, and return a cited, auditable decision within minutes under the customer's own compliance playbook, encoded in plain language by an SOP enforcement layer, while a second agent monitors continuously for relationships outside predefined rules.

The platform's tool catalog is a browsable marketplace: sanctions screening across 1,400-plus programs, adverse media in 30-plus languages, litigation and regulatory enforcement lookups, UBO enrichment, device and IP intelligence, corporate registries individually listed across 50-plus jurisdictions, a verification suite spanning ID checks, forged-document and AI-image detection, a Web Browsing Agent and a Computer Use tool for reaching data behind internal applications, and a named Snowflake connector into the customer's own databases.

Deployment is the standout: fully managed cloud, private VPC peering, or on-premise and air-gapped with no external connectivity, with SOC 2 Type II certification, enterprise SSO, fine-grained RBAC, customer-configured retention including zero-data-retention modes, AI guardrails against prompt injection, and immutable per-action audit logs exportable to the customer's SIEM. Fortune 500 companies, banks and fintechs run it in production; pricing is by enterprise quote with no published rate.

Vendor details

Canonical URL

https://www.variance.com

Subcategory

Agentic AI for financial crime and compliance investigations

Funding status

Independent, headquartered in San Francisco, founded in 2023 by chief executive Karine Mellata and co founder Michael Lin, who previously worked on fraud engineering and machine learning at Apple and Discord. The company began as Intrinsic, a Y Combinator backed trust and safety tooling startup, before focusing on financial crime as Variance. It raised a twenty one and a half million dollar Series A in March 2026 led by Ten Eleven Ventures, with 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Urban Innovation Fund, and Okta Ventures, bringing total funding to twenty six million dollars, and serves financial institutions and Fortune 500 companies.

Company status

independent

Use cases & customers

Primary use cases

KYC and KYB investigationsanti money laundering and transaction monitoringfraud investigationssanctions and adverse media screening

Target customers

banks and financial institutionsfintechs and marketplacesFortune 500 compliance and fraud teams

Deployment options

SaaScloudon premiseair gapped

Integrations

Variance natively integrates more than one hundred fifty global data sources into its agents, including corporate registries across more than fifty jurisdictions, sanctions lists, court records, adverse media, device signals, and identity verification across surface, deep, and dark web environments. A marketplace of plug and play investigative tools and connectors to a customer's existing data sources feed a proprietary context engine, and every data source is grounded in agent audit logs for defensibility.

In practice

Your analysts spend days per case pulling registrations, tracing beneficial ownership, and checking sanctions across a dozen systems. Variance's agent runs the full investigation in minutes and returns a cited, auditable decision that follows your compliance playbook.

Fraudsters use generative AI to mass produce synthetic identities faster than rule based systems can catch them. Variance's continuous monitoring agent reasons over relationships and behavior to surface coordinated rings and risks before they trip predefined rules.

Your institution cannot let sensitive customer data leave its own infrastructure. Variance deploys fully on premise or air gapped with customer managed encryption keys, so data stays sovereign and is inaccessible even to Variance.

Sources & related URLs

Research sources

https://www.variance.com/ https://www.variance.com/product/tools https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260331771752/en/Variance-Raises-$21.5M-Series-A-to-Transform-Risk-Workflows-with-AI-Agents https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/variance

Agentic Index coverage score

10.0 / 14 capabilities · 71%

Integrations & Tool Calling	Full
A documented tool catalog with named entries across seven categories: sanctions screening across 1,400-plus programs, PEP screening, adverse media in 30-plus languages, litigation and dockets, UBO enrichment, device and IP intelligence, corporate registries individually listed across 50-plus jurisdictions with the countries named, a suite of verification tools, and a named Snowflake connector retrieving from the customer's own databases, with a full integration list on request. SourceVariance, variance.com/product/toolsread 2026-09-07
Workflow Orchestration	Full
Customers compose their own investigative agents and encode their own workflows. The tools page frames the platform as first-party tools for custom investigative agents, customers compose agents from the catalog, the SOP layer encodes any investigative workflow in plain language for consistent, traceable execution, and the documented flow runs full investigations end to end: evidence pull, ownership tracing, screening, and a structured Decision plus Evidence Pack, with a second agent monitoring continuously. SourceVariance, variance.com/product/toolsread 2026-09-07
Knowledge Grounding & RAG	Full
A maintained investigative corpus with named machinery: the Context Engine appears in the vendor's own catalog doing entity resolution, fraud pattern detection and link discovery over the customer's mapped universe of entities, events and relationships, the Linkage Deep Dive tool tracks related entities from common identifiers, and every finding grounds in verifiable external evidence carried into the audit logs. An ontology and data lake sit behind it. SourceVariance, variance.com/product/toolsread 2026-09-07
Human Oversight & Guardrails	Full
The customer's own playbook is the guardrail, on the vendor's surface: the SOP enforcement layer encodes compliance procedure in plain language and agents execute it consistently and traceably, the audit surface records every agent or human decision, human decision points sit in the loop across review tiers, and decisions return as cited packages under the customer's own procedures. Customer-encoded policy governs every step, and the human decision points are documented. No configurable threshold for what routes to review is documented. SourceVariance, variance.com/security and variance.com/product/toolsread 2026-09-07
Security, Identity & Governance	Full
The security page pairs an attestation with controls customers use. Variance is SOC 2 Type II certified, and the page names enterprise SSO, fine-grained role-based access controls, workspace-configured retention, and immutable timestamped audit logs of every agent action, decision and configuration change, with AI-specific guardrails, prompt injection defenses, output validation and behavior boundaries, 24/7 SIEM monitoring, named penetration testing by Calif, and a trust center at trust.variance.com. Customer managed keys are offered alongside the on premise and air gapped options. Variance is pursuing AIUC-1 certification but does not yet hold it. SourceVariance, variance.com/securityread 2026-09-07
Observability & Auditability	Full
Immutable, timestamped records of every agent action, decision and configuration change, ready for review, with audit logs available for every agent or human decision, direct SIEM export of decisions and logs, and every finding grounded in verifiable external evidence within the agent audit logs per the tools page. SourceVariance, variance.com/security and variance.com/product/toolsread 2026-09-07
Memory & State Persistence	Partial
Customers control what the platform keeps and for how long, though it has no memory layer of its own. Retention is customer-configured per workspace, and zero-data-retention configurations keep data from persisting beyond a single request. The context engine and data lake are the investigation corpus, not memory. No agent memory layer distinct from that corpus is documented, so whether agents carry anything from one investigation into the next is not stated. SourceVariance, variance.com/securityread 2026-09-07
Deployment & Data Residency	Full
Three deployment models are on offer: fully managed cloud, private VPC peering with the data staying in the customer's network, and on-premise or air-gapped with no external connectivity for the most sensitive environments, plus dedicated environments and zero-data-retention configurations. The choice extends to the customer's own infrastructure, air gapped and sovereign setups included. SourceVariance, variance.com/securityread 2026-09-07
Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs	Full
A literal marketplace: the tools page is a browsable catalog of plug-and-play investigative tools the vendor enriches regularly, and four solution workflows, Know Your Customer, Know Your Business, Transaction Monitoring, and Customer Due Diligence, each carry their own page and are adopted selectively, whole investigation products rather than stages of one pipeline. SourceVariance, variance.com/product/tools and variance.com/solutionsread 2026-09-07
Triggers & Channel Coverage	Partial
Two trigger classes are documented: alert-driven investigation on the transaction monitoring solution page, and the continuously monitoring second agent surfacing relationships outside predefined rules, with SIEM export as the outbound path. No trigger surface customers configure, schedule, event subscription or channel beyond the application is documented, so which events can start an investigation, and where results can go besides the SIEM, is not stated. SourceVariance, variance.com/solutions/transaction-monitoring and variance.com/securityread 2026-09-07
Model Flexibility & Routing	Not documented
The platform runs the vendor's own contextual reasoning with no model provider named for any layer and no customer or admin choice of model documented anywhere; the security page's statement that models are not trained across customers by default is a data boundary, not a selection surface. SourceVariance, variance.com/securityread 2026-09-07
APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility	Partial
Extension runs through the vendor's catalog and its engineers rather than a public developer surface. The marketplace of plug-and-play tools, custom agent composition, and the Snowflake connector reaching into the customer's own databases give a buyer real ways to extend the platform, and the application lives at dashboard.intrinsicapi.com, a trace of the company's API-first heritage. No public API reference, SDK or MCP surface is documented anywhere, and the tools page states the engineering team configures tools with the customer, so setup is assisted rather than self serve. SourceVariance, variance.com/product/toolsread 2026-09-07
Testing, Debugging & Optimization	Not documented
No backtesting, test set or comparable result is published for customers, and nothing shows a playbook change being tested against past cases before it goes live. Variance's claim of human-level precision validated across hundreds of cases is its own validation of its own agents at a customer, not something a buyer can run. Output validation on the security page is a runtime guardrail, not a test harness. SourceVariance, variance.com/securityread 2026-09-07
Browser & Computer Use	Partial
The tool catalog names two tools that work in interfaces: a Web Browsing Agent that browses the web to research and gather evidence, and a Computer Use tool that accesses data behind internal tools and other apps. Both act inside interfaces Variance does not control, where fragility matters to a buyer. Both are catalog entries with no documented depth of control or modality coverage, and nothing describes how the Computer Use tool copes when an internal application changes. SourceVariance, variance.com/product/toolsread 2026-09-07

The Agentic Index coverage score grades every vendor Full, Partial or Not documented against the same 14 buyer facing capabilities, from public evidence only. Each capability links to how all vendors in the index score on it. How this evidence is graded

Pricing

Contact for pricing

not disclosed

What is public

No list pricing. Variance sells to financial institutions and large enterprises through direct engagement, but rates are not public.

Billing mechanics

Not established. No billing unit is published, whether per case, per signal volume or a platform subscription, and how the deployment environment affects cost is not stated; ask the vendor.

Cost watchouts

Cost scales with case and signal volume, the number of integrated data sources, and the deployment environment, and on premise or air gapped installations carry additional infrastructure and integration effort.

Variable cost rationale

Priced against case and signal volume, integrated data sources, and deployment environment, so cost grows with investigation throughput and the breadth of connected sources.

Additional watchouts

Confirm whether pricing is per case, per signal volume, or a platform subscription, which data source tools are included, and how on premise or air gapped deployment affects cost.

Sales call required

Yes, required for paid access

Free / trial

Demo on request; no public free tier

Key ambiguities

No public rate is disclosed, and whether pricing is per case, per signal volume, or a platform subscription with data sources is not clear.

Agentic Index verified 2026-09-07

Official pricing page

Related vendors

Alternatives to Variance

The closest documented capability profiles to Variance among enterprise operations agents tracked by Agentic Index, ordered by similarity on the same 14 point evidence the rankings use. No vendor pays for placement.

Mentat9.0 / 14A lighter documented profile than Variance
Clio10.5 / 14Fuller documented coverage on Triggers & Channel Coverage and APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility
DraftWise8.5 / 14A lighter documented profile than Variance
Legora10.5 / 14Adds documented Model Flexibility & Routing
Workday10.5 / 14Adds documented Testing, Debugging & Optimization
CoCounsel10.0 / 14Adds documented Model Flexibility & Routing

Similarity is computed from each vendor's Agentic Index coverage score evidence, axis by axis, not from the totals. How this evidence is graded

Compare Variance with other vendors →Compare all enterprise operations agents →See where Variance ranks →

Data confidence: high

Head to head

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