After three exits, Eyal Azoulay raises $20 million Seed to automate financial crime investigations
Tangos AI is building AI agents to replace the labor-intensive process of investigating suspicious transactions.
Israeli startup Tangos AI, which has developed an AI platform for financial crime investigations, has raised $20 million in Seed funding in a round led by Red Dot Capital Partners.
The round also included Leaders VC, Clarim, Venture Israel, SignalFire, Clutch Capital, Selah Ventures, and a strategic investment from Bright Data.
Founded in 2025 by serial entrepreneur Eyal Azoulay, Tangos AI is building AI agents designed to automate complex financial crime investigations. Azoulay has previously completed three startup exits, including a company acquired by BNY.
The company's team includes former officials from the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), veterans of Israel's intelligence and security community, and AI specialists who previously led large-scale autonomous systems projects.
Financial crime is estimated to cost more than $1.5 trillion annually. Financial institutions are struggling to keep pace with rising volumes of suspicious activity alerts, increasingly stringent regulatory requirements, and a global shortage of experienced investigators. As a result, many organizations are forced to prioritize only a fraction of cases, leaving more complex investigations unresolved.
Tangos AI currently employs about 20 people in Israel, alongside a team of experts in Washington, D.C., with additional hiring underway.
In an interview with Calcalist, Azoulay explained how the idea for the company emerged.
"My previous company was acquired by a large bank in New York. Our technology identified potentially problematic financial activity. After the acquisition, I visited one of the bank's major operations centers in India. Hundreds of investigators were sitting in front of screens reviewing alerts one by one. That's when I realized how much of this work still depends on human investigation."
According to Azoulay, while numerous technologies exist to detect suspicious transactions, the real bottleneck begins after an alert is generated.
"Most detection systems ultimately produce three possible outcomes: block the transaction, approve it, or send it for manual review. That third category requires enormous manpower. We're replacing the thousands of investigators who analyze ambiguous alerts, gather evidence, and determine whether a transaction should proceed."
He said existing anti-financial-crime tools have reached their practical limits.
"The industry has become very good at identifying obvious risks, but there's always a percentage of complex cases that requires experienced investigators using sophisticated investigative methods. Our platform integrates with existing systems and automates those investigations rather than replacing the detection engines."
Azoulay argues that AI is fundamentally reshaping both financial crime and the tools needed to combat it.
"The people committing financial crimes are also using AI. That has made many traditional detection methods less effective. Financial crime is growing by roughly 15% annually, driven in part by AI, while regulators are demanding more thorough investigations and stronger audit trails. The entire approach needs to change."
He added that financial institutions are increasingly looking to AI to improve efficiency across compliance operations.
"Every executive team today is asking the same question: how can AI help perform work currently handled by thousands of employees? We are launching commercial deployments with major customers in the United States and other markets and expect our platform to become generally available next month."
According to Azoulay, accuracy is the company's highest priority.
"In financial crime investigations, false positives are extremely costly. When you flag a legitimate customer, the consequences can be significant. We've invested heavily in building a system that is exceptionally accurate."
The company launched in July 2025 with a SAFE pre-Seed financing before raising the current seed round.
Tangos AI's platform supports investigations involving money laundering, fraud, sanctions compliance, risk management, and regulatory compliance. It analyzes ownership structures and hidden relationships, maps networks of companies, accounts and related parties, and automatically compiles evidence into a documented investigation file with a complete audit trail.
"Financial institutions have invested billions of dollars in detection infrastructure over the last decade, but investigations remain one of the most resource-intensive functions across compliance and risk organizations," said Yaniv Stern, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Red Dot Capital Partners. "Tangos has developed a category-defining platform that enables organizations to investigate complex cases more efficiently while maintaining the governance, transparency and evidentiary standards required by regulators."
