Financial compliance can be a pretty dry affair—so much so that there are compelling business opportunities to be found for those who can help people to do less of it. One startup seizing on this opportunity is Greenboard, a platform for using AI to automate aspects of financial compliance, that has raised $15.5 million in a Series A funding round.
Base10 Partners led the round, which also drew participation from Y Combinator, General Catalyst through its acquisition of Wayfinder, Commerce Ventures, Transpose Platform, and Liquid2 Ventures. The funding follows on Greenboard’s $4.5 million seed round from 2024, which Base10 also led.
More than 500 financial institutions run their compliance programs on Greenboard, which now includes a conversational compliance platform called Greenboard Go. At a time when the breakneck progress of AI models is causing consternation among SaaS companies, Greenboard says most institutions are struggling with how to automate compliance solutions on their own.
“There are all these very specific compliance requirements around books and records that you’re not going to be able to vibe code,” Greenboard co-founder and CEO Dave Feldman told Fortune in an interview.
Greenboard was co-founded by Feldman and Ed Schembor. The pair met as engineering undergrads at Johns Hopkins. Feldman said he began thinking more about financial compliance while working as a senior project manager at Guideline, a business for automating 401(k) platforms that has since been acquired by Gusto.
When ChatGPT went viral in 2022, Feldman realized that AI could lead to a different experience for compliance, which many people find “kind of stinks,” the Texan founder said. Greenboard then went through the winter 2024 cohort of the Y Combinator startup accelerator.
At a time when coding chops are providing less of an edge to software firms, Feldman argued that software companies need to carve out moats by making a sticky product in a highly-regulated space where the company can create a proprietary data advantage. The co-founder argued that his business has all three and noted that 88% of its customers eliminate multiple legacy compliance solutions after switching to Greenboard.
Being in a highly-regulated space like compliance also elevates the stakes for AI products, however. Delve, another Y Combinator-backed compliance automation startup, has faced allegations of cutting corners on its AI auditing process. To retain client trust, Feldman said Greenboard is designed to be “expert in the loop”, an approach to building AI tools whereby the AI handles routine tasks while human experts oversee the outputs.
Feldman acknowledged that all of this is “just inherently unsexy,” but he said his broader hope is that Greenboard can do away with some compliance-induced tedium and help firms get back to business.
“You can pretty apolitically say there are a lot of folks very dissatisfied with how the U.S. government works,” Feldman said. “Making it so regulation doesn’t slow business down is something that could really be a step change for our society.”