Unit21
by Unit21
Agentic AI platform for fraud prevention and AML operations
Unit21 is a fraud and anti-money-laundering platform for banks, credit unions and fintechs that combines configurable no-code detection rules with AI agents for alert triage and investigation. It is built for compliance and fraud teams who want to change detection logic themselves and cut the analyst hours spent on false-positive alerts and regulatory filings.
Unit21 is a San Francisco company, founded in 2018 by Trisha Kothari (CEO) and Clarence Chio, that sells a fraud-prevention and anti-money-laundering (AML) platform to banks, credit unions, fintechs and crypto firms. Its core is a configurable rules engine that lets compliance analysts build, backtest and shadow-test detection logic against historical or live data without engineering help, layered with graph-based rules for entity-relationship analysis and machine-learning risk scoring. The company now positions itself as an agentic AI platform: a Detection Agent analyses alerts and behavioural signals, an Investigation Agent automates alert analysis, drafts case narratives and surfaces linked entities, and a dedicated agent validates FinCEN 314(a) matches. Around that sit transaction monitoring, case management, payment and sanctions screening, customer risk rating, regulatory filings (SARs, STRs, CTRs, 314(a), goAML), device intelligence and a fraud consortium that Unit21 says covers 80M+ U.S. adults. Unit21 claims real-time monitoring at under 250ms across RTP, FedNow, ACH, card and crypto rails, 4.5 billion events monitored monthly, and that 5% of U.S. SARs are filed through it. Named customers include Chime, Brex, Intuit, Crypto.com, Sallie Mae, Green Dot, FIS, Jack Henry and Rippling. It raised a $45M Series C in June 2023 led by Tiger Global, bringing total funding to about $92M. Independent comparisons place it as the workflow-and-audit-control option in a market that includes Sardine, SEON, Sift and Alessa, with the trade-off that it needs more rule tuning out of the box.
The BSA/AML or fraud-operations lead at a bank, credit union or fintech who must defend detection logic to examiners and wants to own rule changes without waiting on engineering.
Fewer false-positive alerts and less analyst time per case, with AI-drafted case narratives and an auditable trail from detection through SAR filing.
At a Glance
- Category
- Governance & Security
- Pricing
- Contact for pricing
- Target Market
- Chief Compliance Officers, BSA/AML Officers, Fraud Operations Leaders, Fintech Risk Teams
- Deployment
- Cloud-first
- Founded
- 2018
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, USA
Key Features
- ✓Investigation Agent
Automates alert analysis, generates case narratives and surfaces linked entities, cutting the manual work per investigation.
- ✓Detection Agent
Analyses alerts and behavioural signals in real time to flag suspicious activity before analysts ever open a queue.
- ✓No-code rules with backtesting and shadow mode
Compliance analysts build, backtest and shadow-test rules on historical or live data without engineering, so threshold changes ship the same day.
- ✓Graph-based rules and entity analysis
Visual graph analysis uncovers relationships between accounts, devices and customers that single-transaction rules miss.
- ✓Case management and regulatory filings
Handles SARs, STRs, CTRs, 314(a) and goAML filings inside the same audited workflow as the alerts that produced them.
- ✓Real-time fraud monitoring and device intelligence
Vendor-stated sub-250ms decisioning across RTP, FedNow, ACH, cards and crypto, with device risk scores that detect rooted devices and VPNs.
Capabilities
Use Cases
- •AML transaction monitoring
A sponsor bank monitors fintech-partner transactions with configurable rules and AI risk scoring, escalating only alerts that merit investigation.
- •L1 alert triage with AI agents
A card issuer like Green Dot uses Unit21's AI agent to handle first-level alert triage so analysts focus on genuinely suspicious cases.
- •SAR and CTR filing
Investigators move from alert to case to regulator-ready SAR or CTR filing inside one system, preserving a complete audit trail for examiners.
- •FinCEN 314(a) match validation
An agent compares key identifiers against 314(a) request lists and validates potential matches, shortening a recurring manual compliance task.
- •Rule tuning before deployment
A compliance team backtests a new threshold against historical data in shadow mode to measure false positives before switching it on.
Ideal For
Best For
- ✓BSA/AML compliance teams that need examiner-ready, fully auditable detection logic
- ✓Fintechs and sponsor banks running transaction monitoring across ACH, cards, RTP/FedNow and crypto
- ✓Teams drowning in L1 alerts who want AI triage and auto-drafted case narratives
- ✓Institutions that want to backtest and shadow-test rule changes before they go live
Not Ideal For
- ✗Programs whose main exposure is synthetic-identity or account-opening fraud, where a consortium-first vendor such as Sardine may catch more out of the box (per Fluxforce's comparison)
- ✗Teams without the analytics maturity to tune rules, since independent comparisons note it needs more calibration than turnkey models to reach low false-positive rates
- ✗Small buyers wanting self-serve published pricing — Unit21 does not list prices
Deployment
Market Analysis
Pros
- ✓No-code rules let compliance teams react to new regulatory guidance the same day instead of in the next sprint
- ✓Strong audit trail and BSA workflow alignment for examiner scrutiny
- ✓Consolidates fraud and AML monitoring, case management and filings in one platform
- ✓Blue-chip fintech customer base including Chime, Brex, Intuit and Crypto.com
Cons
- ✗Needs more calibration out of the box than turnkey-model competitors to reach comparable false-positive precision (Fluxforce)
- ✗Synthetic-identity detection relies on the customer's own data and rules when an identity has not been seen in Unit21's network (Fluxforce)
- ✗Implementation can require more planning and coordination than fully unified single-stack platforms (SEON comparison)
- ✗No published pricing
Pricing
Enterprise
Contact for pricing
- ✓Fraud and AML modules
- ✓AI agents
- ✓Case management and regulatory filings
Unit21 publishes no list pricing (its /pricing page returned 404 on 2026-09-30). Fluxforce's comparison describes a platform fee with usage-based components tied to seats and alert volume, which it says can undercut transaction-volume pricing for lower-velocity banks with complex case work.
Security & Compliance
Connect
Sources
This page was written from 7 sources, 4 on domains other than unit21.ai.
Stay Ahead of the Curve
Weekly enterprise AI insights for technology leaders. No spam, no vendor pitches—unsubscribe anytime.
SubscribeRelated Products
Apate.ai
AI voice and text agents that pose as scam victims to pull fraud intelligence out of live scam operations
Baselayer
Business identity, risk and fraud infrastructure that now verifies AI agents before they transact
SAS AI Navigator
SaaS AI governance inventory for models, agents and use cases, sold through Microsoft Marketplace
Rein Security
Runtime security for enterprise AI agents, deployed as a sidecar inside your own cloud