The more sophisticated the investor, the harder they are to onboard. Compliance checklists break down across complex ownership chains, triggering endless email threads, manual reviews, and delays, a reality that has become standard across the financial industry.
Steward believes that complexity shouldn’t slow down capital. Today, the company announced a $5 million funding round to bring automation to one of finance’s most persistent operational bottlenecks.
The AI-first compliance platform automates AML/KYC for the investors that challenge traditional systems. By focusing on highly complex onboarding cases, Steward is positioning itself as critical infrastructure for regulated firms that need to onboard sophisticated investors quickly, including private markets funds, banks, brokers, and UCITS managers.
The round was led by Motive Partners, with participation from Outward VC, Cooley and a group of founders and operators, including Shai Wininger (Co-Founder, Lemonade/Fiverr), Mark Ransford (FinTech angel investor), Tom Keiser (former COO of Zendesk and Carta), Remy Astié and Ulric Musset (Co-Founders, Vauban), Mushegh Tovmasyan (Founder, Zenus Bank), and Keith Grose (UK CEO, Coinbase).
Investors Worth The Risk:
There’s a class of client that every firm wants to onboard yet the operational teams often find challenging: fund-of-funds, family offices and offshore trusts. These aren’t edge cases, rather the norm in institutional capital, and they expose how broken AML/KYC infrastructure still is: manual reviews, email chains, disconnected tools and perpetual remediation cycles. The result is weeks/months of delay, poor investor experience, and deals that quietly die.
Arik Oslerne, Co-Founder and CEO of Steward, said: “Compliance has been a linear scaling problem for years. Firms can’t handle the amount of work on their plate with their existing resources, and face endless remediations and regulatory scrutiny. AI is the only way to put this to rest, and that’s exactly what Steward was built for.”
Complexity Finally Automated:
Steward’s platform brings document collection, screening, risk assessment, and periodic reviews into one workflow, with AI agents designed to interpret layered ownership and cross-border structures. Moreover, the use of shareable Investor Profiles allows firms to share AML/KYC data securely with counterparties to accelerate dealmaking.
Steward says the platform enables same day onboarding in 80% of cases, regardless of investor complexity.
Notable users include Connect Ventures, Unruly Capital, IAB Group, with Motive Partners and Outward also active users, as well as a number of Tier 1 institutional allocators.
Hugo Bongers, Partner, Venture at Motive Partners, stated: “Compliance is at an inflection point. Firms can no longer scale manual processes, and investors are demanding improved experiences. Steward is well positioned to become foundational infrastructure for investor lifecycle management.”
A Team That Knows:
Steward is built by people who have been here before. Arik Oslerne (CEO) was previously COO at Vauban, the private markets infrastructure platform (exited to Carta), giving him a firsthand view of exactly where onboarding breaks down in institutional capital. Moshe Lieberman (CTO) was the 1st employee at Lemonade (NYSE: LMND) and an early engineer at Fiverr (NYSE: FVRR), two companies that used software to make previously painful industries frictionless.
Steward is dual-headquartered in New York and London, and will use the new funding to expand product capabilities and continue to scale the team.
