Munich-based Company, Hawk Secures Funding to Fight Financial Crime with AI

Hawk is a Munich-based AI-driven compliance platform, which has just announced a $56 million Series C funding round to accelerate its mission of transforming how financial institutions detect and prevent money laundering, sanctions breaches, and fraud. 

Funding Investment 

The funding round was led by One Peak and supported by prominent investors such as Macquarie Capital, Rabobank, BlackFin Capital Partners, Sands Capital, DN Capital, Picus Capital, and Coalition. With this new investment, Hawk will continue developing its modular compliance platform, investing in capabilities like real-time transaction monitoring, scalable fraud detection, and deeper integrations with third-party data providers. 

Further, the company plans to grow its team, particularly in the US, where it sees major opportunities to support banks and fintechs struggling with outdated compliance technology.

New Compliance Solutions 

For many banks and financial institutions across the United States and Europe, traditional rules-based systems remain the norm, but they’re no longer fit for their purpose. These older systems typically generate massive volumes of false positive alerts, overwhelming compliance teams and leading to spiralling costs and inefficiencies. Worse yet, savvy criminals often exploit the rigidity of such systems, slipping through undetected.

Hawk solves this conundrum by offering a smarter alternative. Its AI-powered platform reduces false positives while increasing detection rates for genuine financial crime. The key lies in combining classic rules with explainable AI and machine learning algorithms that adapt to new threats but remain transparent and auditable for regulatory purposes.

Ending Financial Crime 

Founded in 2018 by Tobias Schweiger and Wolfgang Berner, Hawk is a provider of AI-supported anti-money laundering and fraud prevention technology. Banks, payment providers, and FinTechs can utilise Hawk’s combination of traditional rules and explainable AI to improve the effectiveness of their AML compliance and fraud prevention by identifying more crime while reportedly maximising efficiency by reducing false positives.

These developments have seen Hawk quickly become the compliance solution of choice for more than 80 customers globally. These range from Tier 1 banks to digital-first fintechs, including Ecobank, Vodafone, Worldline, VR Payment, VakifBank International, Volt, and Synctera. Its customer base reflects the growing appetite for advanced technology capable of navigating today’s increasingly complex regulatory environments.

Key Differentiators

One of Hawk’s key differentiators is its focus on explainable AI. Many AI systems operate as black boxes, but Hawk’s technology is designed to show compliance teams why an alert was triggered, a vital requirement for auditors, regulators, and internal governance teams. This balance between innovation and accountability makes Hawk particularly well-suited to the demands of highly regulated financial environments.

As criminals become more agile and financial crime grows more complex, the need for intelligent, responsive compliance systems has never been greater. Hawk is positioning itself as a new standard in financial crime detection, one that’s accurate, scalable, and trusted by institutions across the globe.

By combining AI sophistication with regulatory clarity, Hawk is setting a new benchmark for the industry, challenging the status quo, and giving compliance teams the tools they need to stay ahead of evolving threats.