Finance
Check out the 9-page pitch deck Themis, which offers pay-as-you-go compliance for banks, fintechs, and crypto startups, used to raise $9 million in seed funding
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- Financial firms are spending billions on increasingly onerous compliance rules each year.
- Themis offers pay-as-you-go risk-management and compliance for banks, fintechs and crypto startups.
- See the nine-slide deck Themis used to raise $9 million in seed funding.
When Themis founder and CEO Neepa Patel set out to build a new compliance tool for banks, fintech startups, and crypto companies, she tapped into her own experience managing risk at some of the nation’s biggest financial firms.
Having worked as a bank regulator at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and in compliance at Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and the enterprise blockchain company R3, Patel was well-placed to assess the shortcomings in financial compliance software.
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But Patel, who left the corporate world to begin work on Themis in 2020, drew on more than just her own experience and frustrations to build the startup.
“It’s not just me building a tool based on my personal pain points. I reached out to regulators. I reached out to bank compliance officers and members in the fintech community just to make sure that we’re building it exactly how they do their work,” Patel told Insider. “That was the biggest problem: No one built a tool that was reflective of how people do their work.”
The demand for financial compliance tools has increased dramatically since the Financial Crisis. In 2017, Deloitte estimated that spending on compliance at retail and corporate banks had increased 60% since the 2008 housing collapse. Last year, LexisNexis Risk projected that financial firms in the US and Canada spent roughly $50 billion on financial crime compliance. And at crypto companies and banks alike, compliance and regulatory issues surrounding digital assets are only growing in importance.
Since Themis’ first line of code was written in May 2021, the startup has nabbed the lease-to-own fintech Kafene and Utah-based business bank Continental Bank, as well as community banks and others, as clients.
Themis’ pay-as-you-go product offerings emphasize collaboration among compliance staff — both within firms and between them and their partners and regulators. Users of the software can track customer complaints, share marketing documents, and review policies and procedures, among other features, all while tracking changes at each step of the way to create a reliable audit trail.
This April, Themis announced $9 million in seed funding from backers TTV Capital, Felicis, and Walkabout Ventures (a pre-seed investor in the startup).
“Being able to build a strong technical team, and have a product in market in less than a year being used by reputable companies, was just something that the market was happy about,” Patel said.
Crypto startups represent one prime market where Patel expects Themis to have an impact. In her view, the regulatory and compliance questions crypto startups face isn’t misplaced, but typically focuses too often only on know-your-customer and anti-money laundering efforts.
“There’s a whole side of compliance that everyone’s missing,” in crypto, Patel said. “It’s things like making sure that you respond to complaints, making sure that you review marketing material before it goes out, making sure that you have proper governance internally.”
See the deck Themis used to raise a $9 million seed round.
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