Vital4 is a fintech leader using machine learning and AI for anti-money laundering, workforce, and risk monitoring. It’s designed for the work-from-anywhere economy.
Valor Ventures is proud to lead the seed round of Vital4, Due Diligence Data Search platform headquartered in Atlanta that provides AI-driven risk screening and continuous monitoring to minimize risks. Companies today need to know who their customers are, their employees, and their partners. Vital4’s platform protects them with best-in-class data sourcing and delivery. Vital4 is led by CEO and founder Kristin Stafford, an expert in employee monitoring who previously built and scaled International Screening Solutions and held prior roles at CompuCredit and Northern Trust, and co-founder Amy Barbieri.
“The time is now for solutions like Vital4,” says Valor General Partner Robin Bienfait, who has held multiple CXO roles at some of the world’s largest technology companies, including AT&T, Blackberry and Samsung. “Employers are embracing work-from-anywhere. To do it well, they need a secure process to manage risks around their global team. Vital4 is a rising leader.”
Leader in unbiased data
Vital4’s mission is making continuous monitoring light touch, accurate and automated.“We are committed to harnessing technology to drive costs down and deliver unsurpassed, unbiased results —results that let anyone concerned about real compliance sleep better at night,” says Stafford. Vital4 helps their customers monitor politically exposed persons, watch lists alerts, negative media, third party risks, medical compliance and more.
“Valor leading our seed round equips us to take advantage of this unique opportunity in time to grow even faster,” Stafford says.
Vital4 was founded in March 2016 based on Stafford’s, experience in the monitoring business with previous firms. The software platform launched (v1) in 2017. Since then, Vital4 attracted a significant amount of angel capital, almost $3 million, much of it from industry insiders. After adding machine learning to its algorithms and hiring a successful CRO to professionalize the sales process, Vital4 is ready to scale its early success with enterprise customers.
Inclusion premium approach
Vital4 presented a clear fit with Valor’s investment strategy, which is investing in high performing technology firms headquartered in the Southeast at the first professional round. Vital4’s recurring revenue from its enterprise SaaS software product is well into the seven figures, and growing by double digits year over year. Led by two female co-founders, Kristin Stafford and Amy Barbieri, the firm is a clear example of inclusive leadership. Less than 20% of technology firms are led by women and less than 2% of venture capital is invested in female founders according to the latest data by Crunchbase. However, based on multiple studies, firms led by women and/or inclusive teams are associated with 15-35% better financial performance. By leading this seed round in overlooked overachievers, Valor seeks to drive significant alpha in addition to achieving premium venture capital returns.
Large, a growing global market
There’s approximately a $160B global market in data for financial and healthcare compliance monitoring, which is in many cases a mandated market. Vital4 has identified several trends as tailwinds to its growth:
- In 2018 over $39B was spent on US National Healthcare and Compliance Services
- 650,000 U.S. firms are required to meet AML legislation, growing to 5M+ as regulations expand
- Top 10 FCPA settlements netted $7.5bn in fines, 134 further disclosed FCPA investigations underway
- Compliance professionals and company executives are seeing greater personal liability for shortfalls
