The $16.2m Series A was led by the US growth equity fund, Level Equity, with participation from PassFort’s existing investors OpenOcean, Episode 1 and Entrepreneur First. $4.89m worth of venture debt was also provided by Shard Credit Partners, with PassFort being the first investment from its newly launched UK tech-focused venture debt strategy.

The investment teams behind Level Equity and Shard Credit Partners have significant experience and a high level of confidence investing in the RegTech category PassFort now leads and are further boosting the company’s global ambitions.

The funding round follows major customer wins for PassFort, including Curve and WorldRemit, and recent senior hires in its sales and marketing functions. The company is now set for a scaleup in the implementation of its RegTech solution worldwide. 

“We are excited to have secured this substantial new funding so quickly.” Said Donald Gillies, PassFort’s CEO and Co-Founder. “PassFort is currently capitalising on significant growth across the digital economy and the need for our automated compliance solutions, designed to make access to our customers’ products compliant and crime-free.”

Donald added: “It is a testament to the efforts of our team and company culture to have come through the last 12 months in a position where our products and our customer base are growing so rapidly. This helped generate the high investor demand to partner with PassFort on this next phase of growth.”

“Over the last few years, financial institutions and organisations have experienced exponential growth in business volumes and data, which has only increased the complexity in staying compliant with ever-evolving regulatory laws. In parallel, we’ve experienced an unprecedented rise in sophisticated financial crime activity as channels into financial systems have been digitised. This has underscored the importance of compliance matters such as AML/KYC, yet companies often have to weigh the trade-offs between speed, compliance and automation. PassFort has solved this challenge by providing a next-generation RegTech software solution that enables customers to offer a seamless customer onboarding experience, maintain best-in-class monitoring capabilities, and balance automation vs. human touch via its intelligent orchestration engine,” said Charles Chen, Partner at Level Equity, who will join PassFort’s board of directors. “We are thrilled to partner with the industry thought leader in this space and look forward to supporting the company’s future growth initiatives.”

William Chappel, Head of Venture Debt at Shard Credit Partners, said “We are delighted to have been able to provide financing support to PassFort and are extremely pleased to announce this as the first deal of the new Shard Credit Partners tech-focused venture debt strategy. PassFort is a name that I have followed for many years, and Donald and his team continue to build a dynamic and exciting offering. We are looking forward to working closely with PassFort as they continue to achieve strong growth milestones”.