Marble, a Paris-based startup that builds open-source software for detecting fraud and money laundering, has raised €6.5 million in a Series A round led by Smartfin, the European growth investor focused on fintech and deep technology.
ADNEXUS joined the round alongside existing investors Passion, 42Capital and Hexa. TSIC is also an existing investor. The financing, announced on 29 September 2026, brings Marble's total funding to €9 million.
The company was founded in 2021 by Arnaud Schwartz and Pascal Delange, both former executives at French business banking fintech Shine. It says its platform is now in production at more than 100 financial institutions across more than 25 countries, protects over three billion transactions a year and has reduced manual review work by up to 90% for customers. Nearly 70% of its customers are outside France.
The compliance burden
Banks, payment companies and fintechs face intense regulatory pressure to prevent financial crime. They must monitor transactions for suspicious activity, screen customers against sanctions and watchlists, assess customer risk and report concerns to authorities. Failures can lead to heavy fines, loss of licences and reputational damage.
Meeting those obligations is costly and complex. Compliance teams typically rely on rules that flag transactions meeting certain criteria, such as unusually large transfers or payments to high-risk jurisdictions. Those rules generate large numbers of alerts, many of which turn out to be false positives that analysts must review manually. Changing rules to respond to new fraud patterns or regulatory guidance often requires help from software vendors or internal IT teams, which can take weeks.
Marble's platform is designed to address those pain points. It combines fraud and anti-money-laundering workflows, sometimes referred to together as "FRAML", in a single system. Compliance teams can build and adjust transaction monitoring rules themselves, without writing code or waiting for vendors. The platform also covers sanctions and watchlist screening, investigation and reporting, and customer risk scoring.
"Compliance teams shouldn't have to choose between staying compliant and moving fast," said Schwartz, Marble's chief executive.
Why open source
Marble's decision to make its core platform open source is a strategic choice in a sector where most vendors offer proprietary systems. Open-source code allows customers, auditors and regulators to inspect how the system works, which matters when institutions must explain why a transaction was flagged or cleared. It can also reduce vendor lock-in, since customers are not entirely dependent on a single supplier's roadmap.
The company supports both software-as-a-service and on-premises deployment. On-premises options are important for banks and institutions that must keep data within their own infrastructure for regulatory or security reasons. Marble also lets customers test rule changes on live data through A/B testing, helping them understand the effect of a change before rolling it out fully.
Bringing AI into compliance
The new funding will be used to bring artificial intelligence deeper into compliance workflows. Marble plans to use AI to help generate rules, triage alerts and support investigations, as well as to speed up deployment through on-premises installations. It is also developing AI agents that can operate only within defined data permissions.
That last point is significant. Compliance is a field where the appeal of AI is obvious, given the volume of repetitive review work, but where risks are acute. Regulators expect institutions to understand and explain their controls, and they have shown little tolerance for opaque systems. An AI agent that could access any data or take unexplained actions would be a liability. Marble's approach, which restricts agents to specific permissions and keeps decisions traceable, is designed to satisfy those expectations.
The combination of automation and traceability may prove more valuable in regulated markets than having the most capable AI model. Institutions want efficiency, but they need auditability.
Investor view
Saumitra Dubey, a partner at Smartfin, said Marble "becomes the structurally differentiated, modern financial crime operating system for mid-market banks." The focus on mid-market institutions is notable. Large global banks often build their own compliance systems or use enterprise software from established vendors. Smaller banks, credit unions, payment firms and fintechs frequently lack the resources for either, and may be underserved by legacy products designed for much larger organisations.
Marble says about 70% of its customers are replacing existing solutions, suggesting that it is winning business from incumbents rather than only serving new entrants. It is targeting more than €5 million in annual recurring revenue by 2027.
## The cost of false positives
One of the least visible but most expensive problems in financial crime compliance is the false positive. Traditional rule-based monitoring systems tend to err on the side of caution, flagging large numbers of legitimate transactions for review. Industry studies have long suggested that the great majority of alerts generated by such systems do not lead to suspicious activity reports. Each one still requires an analyst's time.
The consequences extend beyond cost. Legitimate customers may see payments delayed or accounts frozen while alerts are investigated, damaging trust and driving business away. Analysts overwhelmed by volume may miss genuinely suspicious activity. Reducing false positives while maintaining detection rates is therefore one of the most valuable outcomes a compliance platform can deliver, and it is where AI-assisted triage, applied carefully, can make a significant difference.
A growing regtech market
The regulatory technology market has grown steadily as financial crime rules have expanded and enforcement has intensified. In Europe, the creation of a new Anti-Money Laundering Authority and a harmonised rulebook is expected to raise standards and increase scrutiny across the region. Globally, the growth of real-time payments, crypto assets and cross-border digital commerce has created new channels for fraud and money laundering that institutions must monitor.
These trends are relevant well beyond Europe. In India, the rapid growth of UPI and digital lending has been accompanied by rising concern about fraud and mule accounts, prompting regulators to tighten expectations on banks and payment companies. Tools that help institutions adapt quickly to new threats, while maintaining explainability, are in demand across markets.
For Marble, the Series A provides the resources to expand internationally and build out its AI capabilities. Its challenge will be to scale while maintaining the transparency and control that set it apart. If it succeeds, it could become a significant player in a market where the cost of getting compliance wrong is measured in fines and, ultimately, in the integrity of the financial system itself.
