Why we invested in Tangos

Financial institutions spend enormous sums making sure they know their customers, and understand the transactions they execute on their behalf are legal. Every bank, every fintech, every regulated business that onboards a client has to answer the same question: is this entity who they say they are, and are they clean? In practice, that means screening transactions and vetting new customers so the institution isn't unknowingly banking a front for something illicit.

It's a costly obligation, and it's getting more expensive as alert volumes rise and regulatory expectations tighten. If a regulated entity sees suspicious transactions, they have to file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) with the regulator. If they fail to file those penalties can be massive, as TD found out in 2024, settling for $3 Billion in fines. 

This compliance requirement is also no longer limited to banks. Any company that onboards counterparties at scale, from fintechs to digital platforms, now carries some version of this burden, and the fines for getting it wrong can be severe.

Institutions triage what they can, closing routine alerts quickly at the first level and escalating the uncertain ones. But financial crime is rarely visible in a single flagged account. The real risk tends to sit a few hops out, in an entity doing business with another entity doing business with someone who is suspicious. Mapping that network by hand, and building a case file that can survive regulatory scrutiny, is a slow, human-intensive undertaking that can take a skilled investigator weeks to complete.

That mismatch is only widening: financial crime keeps evolving while investigation stays manual and slow, and the market for qualified investigators stays stretched thin. Rising volume, deepening network complexity, and a persistent talent shortage is what convinced us this is a problem worth solving now.

_{With Tangos, institutions now have an autonomous AI platform that performs the investigation itself, end to end.}

Rather than adding another layer of alerting, or providing a simple summarization tool that still leaves the hard part to a human, Tangos performs the investigation itself: gathering information, forming hypotheses, mapping relationships across entities and counterparties, validating findings, and producing a complete case file with a full audit trail. What used to take a skilled investigator weeks now takes hours.

We were also convinced by the team. Eyal Azoulay is a third-time founder who has built and sold companies before, including one acquired by BNY Mellon, where he went on to lead their Tel Aviv innovation center. He's sat inside the exact type of institution Tangos now sells to, knows this problem cold, and moves fast with the confidence of someone who's done this before.

The rest of the team reflects the same seriousness. Tangos is led by people who've spent their careers on the enforcement and intelligence side of this exact problem, including leadership with backgrounds at the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, working alongside serious AI engineering talent. This is an AI company with a leadership team that has written and enforced the standards financial crime investigations are held to, and that expertise is built into the product.

We're proud to be part of Tangos's $20 million seed round, led by Red Dot Capital Partners, alongside Clarim, Venture Israel, Signal Fire, Clutch Capital, Selah Ventures, and Bright Data. Financial crime investigation has been a manual, linear process for too long. We're excited to help Tangos build the infrastructure that changes that.

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