Strise AML: The Solution to an $800 Billion Financial Crime Problem
How one Oslo startup convinced 70% of Nordic banks to automate their fight against dirty money.
AI, graph data and three NTNU graduates are rewriting the compliance rulebook for European banking.
The global banking system is losing its war on dirty money. Every year, between $800 billion and $2 trillion in illicit funds flows through the financial system, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. That is roughly 2% to 5% of world GDP. Authorities seize less than 1% of it. Banks collectively spend $274 billion a year on compliance and still miss almost everything. Strise, an Oslo-based artificial intelligence company, is betting that the entire approach is wrong, and that a graph-based AI platform can succeed where decades of manual processes have failed. Some of Europe’s largest financial institutions are already placing that same bet.
Why Banks Spend Billions and Still Miss 98% of Financial Crime
The anti-money laundering industry runs on a paradox. The more banks spend, the worse the outcomes appear to get. Global AML fines totaled nearly $5 billion in 2022, a 50% jump from the prior year. Danske Bank paid $2 billion to the US Department of Justice after €200 billion in suspicious transactions flowed through its Estonian branch. Industry-wide, despite compliance spending growing by up to 10% annually in advanced markets between 2015 and 2022, the financial system still detects only around 2% of illicit flows, according to industry and law enforcement estimates.
The root cause is structural. Compliance analysts spend the majority of their day toggling between company registries, sanctions lists, adverse media databases and internal CRM records. The information arrives in different formats, different languages and with no single authoritative source. False-positive rates in legacy monitoring systems routinely exceed 90%, burying investigators in noise while genuine threats pass undetected.
Hiring more analysts has been the industry’s default response for years. It is no longer viable. The EU’s new Anti-Money Laundering Authority takes effect in 2027. Regulations are expanding faster than headcount budgets. Nasdaq’s 2024 Global Financial Crime Report estimated that $3.1 trillion in illicit funds flowed through the financial system in 2023 alone, and the manual model cannot keep pace.
How Strise Uses Graph AI to Replace Legacy AML Systems
Strise took a fundamentally different approach to the problem. Rather than building another database-lookup tool, co-founders Marit Rødevand (CEO), Sigve Søråsen (CPO) and Patrick Skjennum (CTO) constructed a dynamic knowledge graph that maps relationships across entities, directors, ownership structures, sanctions exposure and adverse media in one continuously updated view.
The three met at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Rødevand had already co-founded and exited Rendra, a construction-tech SaaS business acquired by JDM Technology Group. Søråsen brought a decade of startup experience from the founding teams of E24, Norway’s largest financial news site, and Tidal, the music streaming platform later acquired by Square. Skjennum, an AI and machine learning specialist, wrote much of the original code.
The platform aggregates data from company registries, sanctions lists, PEP databases, beneficial ownership records and adverse media sources, then resolves it into what the company calls a “Golden Record” per entity. AI and natural language processing surface hidden connections that manual reviews miss. A sanctioned individual buried three layers deep in a shell-company ownership chain, for instance, gets flagged automatically. Every automated decision maps to a regulatory obligation, and human review is embedded in the architecture, a design choice built to satisfy the EU AI Act’s requirements for explainability before those requirements even took effect.
“If banks don’t adapt to AI, they risk falling behind,” Rødevand said. “With crime and regulations becoming more complex, traditional methods aren’t enough. Without automation, fighting financial crime becomes costly and inefficient.”
90% Faster Due Diligence and 30% Lower Costs
The performance claims are significant. Atomico partner Don Hoang, a former senior executive at Uber and Revolut who joined the board in 2023, said clients have reported up to a 90% reduction in due diligence time and a 30% cost saving after implementing the system.
The company says its automated monitoring has also cut false positives by 30% to 40%, freeing compliance teams to focus on genuine risk signals rather than chasing phantom alerts. Financial institutions using the platform have increased case-handling capacity up to tenfold without adding staff. In a sector that has spent the last decade solving compliance problems primarily through hiring, that ratio represents a meaningful shift.
Data coverage has scaled just as fast. From an initial dataset of roughly 600,000 Scandinavian entities, the platform now covers more than one billion international entities and 11 million private individuals.
$18.3 Million From Atomico and Klarna’s Inner Circle
Strise has raised approximately $18.3 million across four funding rounds. The defining moment came in September 2023 with a $10.8 million Series A led by Atomico, the venture firm behind early bets on Skype and Klarna. Existing investors Curiosity Venture Capital, Maki.vc and Sondo Capital participated. Angel backers included Camilla Giesecke (Klarna COO), Phil Chambers (founder of Peakon, exited to Workday) and Allison Pickens (former COO of Gainsight).
Hoang called the platform “a game-changer for compliance teams” and pointed to its combination of knowledge graph technology, AI and an interface that analysts actually want to use.
Headcount has grown to nearly 50 employees, a 140% year-on-year increase. The company opened its first international office in London in early 2024 and is targeting expansion across key European markets in financial services, insurance, legal and shipping.
From Nordea to Storebrand: Inside the Strise Client Base
Strise already serves 70% of the Nordic region’s top-tier banks. The roster includes Nordea, Danske Bank, Handelsbanken and the SpareBank 1 alliance. Vipps MobilePay, one of Europe’s largest bank-owned mobile payment providers, uses the platform to onboard low-risk customers instantly while routing complex cases for deeper review.
The deal that best illustrates the company’s scale ambitions landed in 2025. Storebrand, one of the Nordic region’s largest financial groups with NOK 1,281 billion under management, signed a strategic partnership to integrate the platform across its entire portfolio. That means more than 55,000 corporate customers and 2.2 million retail clients spanning insurance, pension, banking and asset management will run through a single AML platform. “Their smart technology aligns with our vision of building trust, improving operations, and fighting financial crime with precision,” said Ine Solberg, Group AML at Storebrand.
Beyond banking, PwC Norway adopted the AML Automation Cloud to centralise operations from pre-screening to full KYC, replacing multiple data vendor agreements and software tools. EY and global law firm Orrick joined the company’s early access programme as it expanded into professional services.
What Sets Strise Apart in a Crowded RegTech Market
The company operates in a competitive field. Quantexa, Encompass, Hawk and ComplyAdvantage are all vying for a slice of the compliance automation market. The company’s core differentiator, according to independent analysts, is what it calls “Super Data”: a focus on data resolution rather than simple aggregation. Where most platforms check records, Strise maps relationships. Entities, directors, ownership structures and sanctions exposure exist in one continuously updated graph rather than in siloed databases.
The approach has earned outside recognition. Fast Company included the company on its 2024 Most Innovative Companies list. Tracxn consistently ranks it among the top performers in RegTech. The company also produces The Laundry, a financial crime podcast hosted by Rødevand that has built a following among compliance professionals, with past guests including Labour MP Margaret Hodge and Financial Times reporters.
Scaling Across Europe as Regulation Tightens
The broader challenge remains enormous. The UN estimates that $7 trillion in private wealth is hidden in haven countries, with roughly 10% of world GDP held offshore. Around 90% of money laundering worldwide goes undetected. Regulatory pressure is only increasing. The EU AI Act now governs how automated decisions are made in compliance settings. AMLA will impose uniform standards across member states for the first time. In the UK, the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act has made “failure to prevent fraud” a criminal offence for larger organisations.
Strise is not claiming to solve all of that overnight. What it is claiming is that the manual, database-driven compliance model banks have relied on for decades cannot keep pace with either the criminals or the regulators. Its customer metrics suggest the model can be replaced.
“Compliance can be a competitive advantage when it’s built on curiosity, not control,” Rødevand said.
With a billion entities on its graph, $18.3 million in the bank and a client base that now spans from Nordic banking giants to one of Europe’s biggest asset managers, the company is approaching the point where that theory meets its largest test yet.
