Arva AI

Justin Spitz, Rhim Shah, and Oliver Wales looked at the compliance stack that banks and fintechs use to onboard businesses and saw a $15 billion industry running on manual spreadsheets and human intuition. Here's the wild part: when a business tries to open a bank account today, a human analyst has to manually verify it over 40 percent of the time. That's not scaling—that's bottlenecking. Arva AI replaces those analysts entirely with autonomous agents that handle AML, KYB, and KYC checks in seconds. Low and medium-risk cases? Instant approval. No waiting, no human bottleneck, no compliance team drowning in manual reviews.

Arva is modular by design, so banks can plug it into their existing compliance stack or rip it out and go full end-to-end. Their agents can conduct advanced web due diligence on business entities, verify documents, check for fraudsters, and do everything a senior compliance analyst would do—except they don't need coffee breaks, vacation, or a six-figure salary. This is YC-backed, it's handling real money movement, and if they pull this off they're going to eat the entire compliance software market alive. Compliance automation is boring but the checks clear.

Based in San Francisco, Arva AI is hunting for banks and fintechs ready to ditch manual reviews.