Monnai Raises $12 Million to Build Global Identity Risk Platform
Los Angeles fintech startup Monnai reaches $23 million in total funding as it scales real-time decisioning infrastructure across four continents
Key Takeaways
- Funding: Monnai raises $12 million in equity funding led by Motive Partners, bringing total capital to $23 million
- Investors: Commerce Ventures and 500 Global participated alongside lead investor Motive Partners
- Performance: Company achieved operating profitability in 2025 with fivefold year-over-year revenue growth
- Scale: Platform processes tens of millions of transactions monthly with sub-500 millisecond response times
- Reach: Infrastructure operates across four continents, serving customers in the U.S., Latin America, Europe, and Asia
- Use of funds: Expansion into Europe and Latin America, plus hiring across engineering, data, and go-to-market teams
Monnai, a global identity and risk data infrastructure company, has closed a $12 million equity funding round led by Motive Partners as it expands operations to meet rising demand from financial institutions seeking better fraud prevention and credit decisioning tools.
The investment brings total capital raised by the Los Angeles-based startup to more than $23 million since its founding in August 2021. Commerce Ventures and 500 Global, both existing investors, participated in the round alongside Motive Partners.
The funding comes as financial institutions and digital businesses worldwide grapple with increasingly sophisticated fraud schemes and the challenge of onboarding customers in markets where traditional credit data remains scarce. Monnai has positioned itself as a provider of the underlying data infrastructure that powers artificial intelligence-driven decisioning systems.
“While risk models and AI-driven decisioning continue to advance, their effectiveness is fundamentally constrained by the quality of the data behind them,” said Pierre Demarche, co-founder and chief executive officer of Monnai. “Our mission is to become the trusted global data infrastructure for identity and risk, delivering the accuracy, latency, and observability required to power real-time decisioning at scale.”
From TeleSign to Startup
Demarche and co-founder Ravish Patel, who serves as chief product officer, bring deep experience in identity verification and telecommunications infrastructure. Both executives previously worked at TeleSign, a communications platform company owned by BICS, a subsidiary of Belgian telecom operator Proximus.
Demarche served as chief strategy officer and head of product management at TeleSign from 2018 to 2021. He holds a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Liège in Belgium and spent more than a decade in executive roles at global technology businesses before launching Monnai.
Patel rose through product management ranks at TeleSign, eventually becoming vice president of identity. His earlier career included stints at KPMG and Subex, where he specialized in fraud management and revenue assurance for telecommunications companies.
The pair identified a gap in the market for unified identity and risk data infrastructure that could operate across borders while maintaining local relevance in emerging markets. Credit bureau coverage in many developing economies hovers around 50 percent of the population, according to Monnai, and that figure continues to decline as younger consumers bypass traditional banking channels entirely.
Business Performance
Monnai has demonstrated strong commercial traction since raising its $6.5 million Series A round led by Tiger Global in March 2023. The company reported operating profitability in 2025 and fivefold year-over-year revenue growth based on internal figures. Net revenue retention approaches 200 percent as existing customers expand their use of the platform across additional risk and fraud workflows.
The platform now processes tens of millions of transactions monthly and delivers decisioning results in under 500 milliseconds. Monnai operates hyperlocal infrastructure across four continents, enabling customers to deploy in new markets within days rather than months.
Many customers generate returns of eight to ten times their initial investment by embedding Monnai within core identity, fraud, and risk workflows, the company said. Clients use the platform as an extension of their internal risk and fraud teams, translating improved data signals into higher onboarding acceptance rates, reduced defaults, lower churn, and improved model accuracy.
How the Technology Works
Monnai aggregates hundreds of data sources that are typically difficult to access and standardize, combining them through artificial intelligence to produce real-time risk signals. The platform delivers more than 500 consumer insights through a single application programming interface, covering onboarding, trust and fraud risk, credit underwriting, and collections optimization.
Built-in back-testing and enterprise-grade observability tools allow customers to monitor data quality, measure model performance, and optimize their systems at scale. The architecture addresses a fundamental challenge facing financial institutions: while the software layer of risk decisioning has advanced rapidly, the underlying data infrastructure has lagged behind.
“As AI enables accelerated software development cycles, we see increasing demand for high-fidelity data and growing value and differentiation in the complex underlying data infrastructure that powers the application layer,” said Thomas Harris, principal of ventures at Motive Partners.
Monnai has developed an AI-based data ingestion engine that automates integration of new data sources in under two hours, improving efficiency by roughly twenty times compared with legacy API integration methods. The system uses natural language processing to aggregate and standardize unstructured data across multiple silos.
Expansion Plans
The new capital will fund continued expansion into key markets in Europe and Latin America while supporting improvements in data effectiveness and response times. Monnai plans to hire across its engineering, data, and go-to-market teams over the next 12 to 18 months.
The company currently supports customers across the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Its infrastructure serves more than three billion consumers in India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, with plans to expand coverage to more than five billion consumers in emerging markets.
Harris said Motive Partners views Monnai as building essential infrastructure for the global financial services industry. “Through combining hundreds of hard to access data sets with AI driven intelligence, Monnai is becoming the go-to identity decisioning partner for global platforms,” he said.
The investment firm sees the company benefiting from what Harris described as a reinforcing flywheel: expanding data access strengthens proprietary signals, which attracts more customers, enabling access to additional data and further improving signal quality.
Market Context
The funding round arrives as digital fraud continues to rise globally. Financial institutions face mounting pressure to verify customer identities accurately while maintaining frictionless onboarding experiences. Traditional approaches that rely on single data sources or region-specific solutions have struggled to keep pace with fraudsters who operate across borders.
Monnai competes with a fragmented landscape of identity verification providers, credit bureaus, and fraud prevention tools. The company differentiates by offering a unified infrastructure layer that aggregates diverse data sources and operates globally while maintaining local market expertise.
For Motive Partners, which specializes in financial technology investments, the deal reflects a broader thesis around the growing importance of data infrastructure in financial services. The firm has invested in companies across payments, capital markets, and wealth management technology.
The startup’s existing investors have maintained their support through multiple rounds. Better Tomorrow Ventures led the seed round in 2022, and Tiger Global led the Series A the following year. Commerce Ventures and 500 Global have participated in multiple funding rounds.
Monnai represents a bet that as financial services become more digital and AI-driven, the companies providing the foundational data layer will capture significant value. With profitability already achieved and customers generating strong returns on their investment, the startup enters its next growth phase from a position of operational strength.
