When Compliance Becomes the New Currency of Growth
Fintech’s last decade was about expanding reach; the next decade is about orchestrating compliance across borders. If 2006 was when “data became the new oil,” 2016 when banks were seen as tech companies, and 2021 when SaaS monetized through embedded finance—then 2026 marks another inflection: every company that leverages financial technology to monetize must master compliance.
Turning data into revenue now depends on moving money securely, often cross-border. Whatever the rails, the common thread is compliance—and with it, Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Business (KYB), and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) obligations. These are no longer exclusive to banks. Any fintech, marketplace, or payments provider handling transactions must meet the same high bar of security, auditability, and risk management.
The scale is vast: the global identity verification market is projected to double from $14.3B in 2025 to $29B+ by 2030, while the KYB software segment is expected to quadruple to $8.7B by 2033. In 2024 alone, regulators issued $3B+ in AML/KYC fines—a reminder that compliance is not optional.
But the issue isn’t just size—it’s experience. Compliance has shifted from the cost of doing cross-border business to the cost of growing cross-border. One in four users abandons onboarding if verification is slow; for B2B, KYB can stretch from days to weeks. Compliance is non-negotiable, but how it’s experienced determines whether a platform wins or loses customers.
Fragmentation drives the pain. Each country’s registries, ID systems, and watchlists differ. Most companies juggle multiple third-party providers to maintain coverage—each integration adding complexity, delay, and risk. The future demands an orchestration-first approach that unifies data sources, simplifies operations, and turns onboarding into a competitive advantage.
Our thesis is simple: the orchestrator that becomes the trusted corridor through which verification checks flow will define the standard for trust in global digital commerce.
SixThirty’s perspective
At SixThirty, we view compliance and onboarding not as a cost center, but as strategic infrastructure—foundational to sustainable growth.
We back companies that blend regulatory fluency with modern architecture—orchestration layers that unify tools and adapt as rules evolve.
Dave Fairman, SixThirty’s CISO-in-Residence and Venture Partner, explains:
“Financial crimes are growing more sophisticated, and regulations are following suit. Institutions can’t afford piecemeal fixes or overlapping point solutions. They need orchestration-layer infrastructure that brings unified control and visibility — making compliance operations robust, agile, and scalable.”
We also seek founders who build for cross-border extensibility—global scale with local nuance.
Evan Thorpe, Principal at SixThirty, adds:
“Across emerging and developed markets — especially in APAC — platforms are cross-border from day one, juggling a patchwork of local regulations. Winning platforms will abstract away that complexity and surface what matters most: getting the right data and the right architecture to deliver it.”
This belief—that compliance infrastructure can be an experience wedge for growth—anchors our thesis. The orchestration layer is where the next generation of trust infrastructure will be established.
AiPrise: “100+ data sources, 200+ countries, 1 API.”
AiPrise provides a unified orchestration platform for global KYC/KYB, enabling fintechs and digital businesses to verify individuals and entities through a single API—automating what was fragmented, manual, and error-prone.
AiPrise integrates leading verification vendors worldwide and layers proprietary AI tools for fraud detection, document analysis, and synthetic ID detection. Its orchestration engine routes each verification to the best provider by geography, regulation, and risk profile—cutting manual compliance time by up to 95%.
Key capabilities
- Breadth of coverage: access to billions of users and hundreds of millions of entities globally.
- Workflow orchestration: a no-code rule engine to tailor risk logic by market or profile.
- Automation & monitoring: an AI co-pilot for auto-review, dynamic risk scoring, and sanctions monitoring.
This orchestration-first model future-proofs compliance. As new data sources or rules emerge, they’re integrated once into AiPrise’s backbone—letting every customer adapt instantly without rebuilding their stack.
AiPrise’s customer base spans fintechs, payment providers, marketplaces, and banks facing multi-jurisdictional scale. Clients have reduced onboarding from weeks to minutes, consolidated vendors, and improved approval rates—proof that orchestration-first compliance delivers measurable advantage.
Behind this success is a standout team. Co-Founders Chaitanya Sarda and Rushabh Shah bring deep technical and compliance expertise from Google and Meta, with global perspective and discipline. Their vision of “compliance as infrastructure” is the kind of long-term thinking that will define financial services.
Why we invested
Our investment in AiPrise fits squarely within SixThirty’s broader thesis: the next generation of financial infrastructure will be established by platforms that build trust and scalability in the market; without them, the digital economy won’t deliver.
AiPrise turns regulatory burden into strategic leverage—transforming verification and onboarding into enablers of trust, not barriers to it. By abstracting dozens of fragmented integrations into one orchestration layer, AiPrise lets fintechs, banks, and marketplaces operate globally with confidence.
This is “compliance as an enabler, not an obstacle.”
Businesses can no longer afford to rebuild integrations every time coverage or formats change; it’s a poor experience and costly. While switching costs once protected legacy providers, AiPrise shows that the right data and architecture can reduce total cost of ownership while improving performance. Platforms will pay switching costs when it bridges to a provider that offers:
- Easy integration
- Better user experience
- Improved risk management
- Seamless geographic expansion
As digital platforms expand and regulators tighten standards, demand for scalable KYB/KYC orchestration is exploding. AiPrise is positioned to become the default layer of trust—the emerging standard for how businesses onboard and verify counterparties across borders.
We backed AiPrise because it represents a rare combination: a massive market need, first-principles architecture, and founder-market fit capable of global impact. Its orchestration-first model doesn’t just solve compliance—it reshapes how trust is built in digital transactions.
By solving KYB and onboarding at scale, AiPrise is helping power a more inclusive, secure digital economy—one where growth and compliance go hand in hand. That’s a future SixThirty is proud to invest in.
