Founded 2018 | HQ: San Francisco | Funding: $92 million

MM Verified

Unit21 was founded in 2018 by Trisha Kothari (CEO, former early engineer at Affirm) and Clarence Chio (President and CTO). The company was built on a simple premise: compliance teams should be able to build, test, and deploy fraud and AML rules without waiting for engineering.

The platform now serves 200+ customers across 90+ countries, including Green Dot, Chime, Sallie Mae, Intuit, and Brex. In 2022, Unit21 monitored 4.8 billion transactions representing $693 billion in value, a 5.2x increase from the previous year.

The company raised $45 million in a Series C in June 2023 led by Tiger Global and South Park Commons, bringing total funding to $92 million. In August 2025, Unit21 launched Build Your Own Agent (BYOA), a no-code framework enabling compliance teams to deploy custom AI agents for fraud and AML tasks.

No-code empowerment for compliance teams. Unit21's defining strength is that compliance analysts, not engineers, own the rules. Teams can build, test, and deploy detection models in a single day without writing code. This eliminates the weeks-long engineering backlogs that plague traditional compliance platforms and keeps rule tuning in the hands of the people who understand the risk.

Consortium intelligence at national scale. The Fintech Fraud Consortium covers over 10 percent of adult consumer transactions in the US, with 75+ members including Brex and Chime sharing fraud signals. This network effect means a fraudster flagged at one member institution is visible to all.AI agents that actually reduce workload. The BYOA framework delivers measurable results: up to 90 percent reduction in alert handle time, 100,000+ tasks automated, and 99.99 percent accuracy across 9,000+ reviewed alerts. These are not experimental models. They are production agents handling real compliance workloads.

Full regulatory filing automation. Unit21 automates SAR, CTR, and STR filing in 40+ countries, including direct submission to FINTRAC and FinCEN. The platform handles the full lifecycle from alert to investigation to filing, reducing SAR preparation time by 78 percent.

Pricing is enterprise-only with no self-serve option. Reported pricing ranges from approximately $33,000 to $740,000 annually according to Vendr, with an average around $160,000. There is no free tier or published pricing. Early-stage fintechs with limited budgets may find the entry point prohibitive.

Documentation requires authentication. Developer docs at docs.unit21.ai are password-protected for authenticated users. This limits the ability of prospective customers to evaluate the platform's technical capabilities before engaging sales, unlike competitors who publish open documentation.

Certification transparency could improve. While Unit21 handles highly sensitive regulatory data, specific SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 certifications are not prominently documented in public materials. Customers in regulated financial services should request current audit reports during due diligence.

Pricing is not publicly disclosed. Unit21 operates on custom enterprise pricing with reported annual costs ranging from $33,000 to $740,000 depending on transaction volume, modules, and integration complexity. No free plan is available. The platform deploys via REST APIs with direct connections to MySQL, MongoDB, Google BigQuery, AWS, Snowflake, and Databricks. Pre-built integrations exist with 200+ data sources including Salesforce, Veriff, and Socure.

Unit21 provides automated regulatory filing across 40+ countries, including SAR submission to FinCEN, STR filing to FINTRAC, and goAML reporting. The platform supports sanctions and PEP screening across global jurisdictions. Specific security certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001) are not prominently documented in public materials. Organisations conducting vendor due diligence should request current certification status directly.

Overall: 4/5

Unit21 is the strongest choice for fintechs and financial institutions that need compliance teams, not engineers, to own fraud and AML detection. The no-code rule building, consortium intelligence, and AI agent framework create a platform where compliance professionals can move at the speed the threat landscape demands. Organisations that need identity verification or payment fraud scoring alongside compliance should pair Unit21 with tools like Persona or Sardine. The 40 percent R&D investment in AI and the BYOA framework suggest Unit21 is building toward autonomous compliance operations, a future where the platform handles investigation and filing with minimal human intervention.

Try Unit21: unit21.ai

Are your compliance teams building rules or waiting on engineering? How fast can you deploy a new detection model when the next fraud vector emerges?