The compliance work behind customer onboarding at fintechs, including KYC checks, document verification, and sanctions screening, is typically managed through visual workflow builders. Teams configure decision logic, connect data providers, and maintain rules. If a head of compliance wants to adjust the review process, they often have to reconfigure flows or raise a ticket with engineering.
Krish Chelikavada and Keon Kim worked with crypto, neobanks, and fintech startups in their previous product, where they ran up against the limitations of traditional compliance tooling. The team decided to found Jina to make compliance automation work differently: instead of building workflows, have an AI agent read existing SOPs and execute them directly.
"We kept seeing the same problem everywhere: compliance teams drowning in manual reviews while their workflow tools sat half-configured because nobody had time to maintain them," Chelikavada, Jina's CEO, said in an interview. "The SOPs already existed. The process was already written down. We just needed software that could actually follow it."
Jina's platform, currently in private beta, is API-first, designed for fintechs that want to build their own in-house compliance tools rather than adopt an off-the-shelf platform. The company positions itself as "Stripe for risk and compliance": a single API that handles the complexity of KYB, KYC, sanctions screening, and AML checks so engineering teams don't have to stitch together dozens of vendors themselves.
Users submit cases via API, specify which tasks to run, and receive structured decisions with complete audit trails. The agent handles document analysis, registry lookups, sanctions screening, adverse media searches, and website verification.
For example, a lender could use Jina to automate KYB onboarding, with the agent extracting data from incorporation documents, cross-referencing corporate registries, screening beneficial owners against sanctions lists, and flagging inconsistencies for manual review. Or a payment processor could automate transaction monitoring alert triage, with the agent investigating patterns and clearing low-risk cases automatically.
"Every finding links back to the source: the registry response, the document extract, the web snapshot," Chelikavada said. "When an examiner asks why you approved something, you can show them exactly what the agent saw and how it reasoned through it."
There is competition in the space. Taktile and Alloy offer workflow-based platforms for identity and risk decisioning, while newer entrants like Greenlite and Roe AI are also building AI-native compliance tools. AiPrise provides verification orchestration across 200+ countries.
Jina appears to be gaining traction, however. Early beta customers report faster case resolution, reduced customer churn caused by manual review delays, and significant cost savings from automating work that previously required additional headcount. The company is currently serving Series A and B fintech startups looking to scale onboarding without expanding their compliance teams.
"Workflow platforms are powerful if you have the team to maintain them," Chelikavada said. "But most compliance teams we talk to don't want to become workflow designers. They want to clear their queue and go home."
San Francisco-based Jina has raised $1.8 million in pre-seed funding from investors including Balaji Srinivasan, Soma Capital, and AllianceDAO. The capital will be put toward product development and expanding the platform's capabilities across onboarding, credit decisions, AML, and fraud prevention.
"Compliance teams are being asked to do more with less," Chelikavada said. "We're seeing strong demand from fintechs that want to scale onboarding without scaling headcount."
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