As financial institutions grapple with increasingly complex investor structures and rising regulatory scrutiny, a new wave of AI-driven platforms is emerging to modernise compliance operations. Steward, an AI-first AML platform focused on investor onboarding and monitoring, has raised $5 million in fresh funding to accelerate automation across compliance workflows and reduce the operational burden on financial teams.
Funding to scale compliance automation
The $5 million funding round was led by Motive Partners, with participation from Outward VC, Cooley, and a network of founders and operators. The round was oversubscribed, reflecting strong investor confidence in Steward’s approach to transforming compliance infrastructure. A group of angel investors also joined the round, bringing experience from fintech, software, and financial services sectors.
The new capital will be used to expand Steward’s product capabilities and grow its team across its dual headquarters in New York and London. The company aims to further develop its AI-driven platform to handle increasingly complex compliance requirements at scale.
Addressing growing complexity in investor onboarding
Investor onboarding has become significantly more challenging in recent years, particularly as ownership structures grow more layered and global. Financial institutions often need to navigate complex chains of entities across multiple jurisdictions, making compliance processes time-consuming and prone to inefficiencies.
Traditional systems rely heavily on manual reviews, fragmented tools, and back-and-forth communication between stakeholders. This approach not only slows onboarding timelines but also increases the risk of errors and repeated remediation efforts.
Steward is designed to address these challenges by automating Anti Money Laundering and Know Your Customer workflows for complex investor profiles. Its platform brings together document collection, identity verification, screening, risk assessment, and ongoing monitoring into a unified system.
AI powered understanding of ownership structures
A core differentiator of Steward’s platform is its ability to interpret complex ownership structures using artificial intelligence. The system is built to analyse multi-layered and cross-border entities, helping compliance teams understand relationships between investors more efficiently.
By automating these processes, Steward reduces the need for manual intervention and enables faster decision-making. The platform also introduces secure and shareable Investor Profiles, allowing firms to exchange compliance data seamlessly across organisations. This reduces duplication of effort and improves collaboration between financial institutions.
Faster onboarding and improved efficiency
According to the company, its platform enables same-day onboarding in a majority of cases, even when dealing with complex investor structures. This represents a significant improvement over traditional processes, which can take days or weeks to complete.
The ability to streamline onboarding not only improves operational efficiency but also enhances the experience for investors, who often face delays and repetitive information requests under legacy systems.
Steward’s client base includes venture capital firms, institutional investors, and financial organisations seeking to modernise their compliance processes and reduce operational friction.
Built by experienced fintech operators
Steward was founded by Arik Oslerne, former COO of Vauban, and Moshe Lieberman, who previously worked at Lemonade and Fiverr. The founding team brings experience in building financial infrastructure and scaling software platforms, which has shaped the company’s approach to compliance automation.
Oslerne has highlighted that compliance operations have historically scaled in a linear way, requiring more resources as workloads increase. This model is becoming unsustainable as regulatory demands grow and investor structures become more complex.
The company positions artificial intelligence as a key enabler for breaking this cycle, allowing firms to manage higher volumes of compliance work without proportionally increasing headcount.
Expanding the future of compliance infrastructure
With fresh funding in place, Steward plans to continue enhancing its platform to support a broader range of compliance use cases. The company is focused on building a system that can adapt to evolving regulatory requirements while maintaining speed and accuracy.
As financial institutions seek to modernise their operations and reduce compliance bottlenecks, platforms like Steward are emerging as critical infrastructure. By combining automation, AI, and integrated workflows, the company aims to redefine how investor onboarding and monitoring are managed across the global financial ecosystem.
