Hi there and welcome to Funded, where we spotlight early-stage bets on the future of tech.
This edition looks at Bretton AI, a fintech that’s raising big to make “trust” a core product feature for financial crime operations.
Bretton AI has raised a $75 million Series B to turn compliance work into something banks can scale. Formerly known as Greenlite AI, the San Francisco company builds AI agents that handle high-volume financial crime workflows across KYC, AML, sanctions, and monitoring, with an emphasis on explainability and auditability inside regulated environments.
Preview of the Bretton AI interface
The round was led by Sapphire Ventures, with continued participation from Greylock, Thomson Reuters Ventures, Canvas Ventures, and Y Combinator, according to the release. New investor TIAA Ventures also joined, and Sapphire partner Rajeev Dham is taking a board seat. The company says it will use the funding to expand into additional financial crime domains, deepen regulatory engagement, and accelerate adoption among larger and more complex institutions, while continuing to invest in product development and growing engineering and go-to-market teams.
The company points to adoption among regulated banks and financial platforms including Robinhood, Mercury, Gusto, Lead Bank, and Coastal Community Bank. It also says customer contract value has climbed to an average of $201,000, up from $85,000 at its Series A and $25,000 at seed, alongside more than $10 million in saved compliance-related headcount costs and risk reduction, plus 195,000 hours of manual work eliminated.
“Compliance is critical to financial product expansion. When a financial institution wants to grow, whether that means launching a new product, entering a new market, or onboarding more customers, compliance is often the constraint,” Lawrence told Future Nexus. “Financial crime workflows are high volume, unstructured, and spread across multiple systems. Analysts were stitching together information across tools and drafting narratives by hand, even for work that followed repeatable patterns. We saw a clear opportunity to modernize these operations safely.”
One detail that feels telling is the rebrand itself. Per the company, “Bretton” is a nod to Bretton Woods (the post-World War II agreement that helped define the modern financial system) and the idea that AI is becoming a foundational shift in how financial institutions operate. It’s an ambitious framing suggesting if Bretton can become the default layer of trusted, audit-ready automation in compliance, it earns a seat in the most entrenched parts of the financial stack.
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This article was drafted with the help of generative AI using company-submitted details, then manually edited and carefully reviewed by a human editor before publication.
