YC-backed fintech Hadrius raises $2m seed round to power SEC compliance using AI
US fintech Hadrius has secured $2 million in seed funding to automate SEC compliance for RIAs and broker-dealers, by running everything from communications review, marketing review, archiving, to trade monitoring and more with AI while doing it all in one modern platform.
The round included participation from world-acclaimed startup accelerator Y Combinator, Lynett Capital, Singularity Capital, Dorm Room Fund, Unpopular Ventures, and the founders of Arrived, SmartAsset, FutureAdvisor, among others.
Already automating compliance for dozens of firms, part of the new funding will be used to extend the startup’s compliance coverage across more communications channels, improving their “ComplianceGPT” model, and growing the number and diversity of firms they serve. The company aims for a world where “compliance is the effortless state of financial firms, rather than constant worry requiring expensive vigilance to maintain”.
The startup, currently headquartered on Wall Street, was founded in 2023 by Thomas Stewart (serial founder with multiple exits under his belt), Som Mohapatra (portfolio manager and chief compliance officer), and Allen Calderwood (ex-Google, ex-Chime senior software engineer). The 3 of them founded and scaled SEC-registered robo-advisor Quantbase for 2 years, where they became deeply familiar with the burdensome state of SEC compliance.
“SEC compliance is necessary for ensuring a mutually beneficial relationship between firm and client, but it requires dozens of hours of effort to meet those obligations, and that time is taken away from providing a better client experience in other ways. We’re very familiar with this after running our own asset manager, and Hadrius developed out of our first-hand experience with this challenge.”
Part of this new funding will go towards product development. The startup’s ferocious, talented engineering team has a number of accolades, including senior software engineers with almost a decade building full-stack consumer products at Google and Amazon, automation engineers at leading fintech firms, and engineers and advisors at firms like Chime, Robinhood, and OpenSea, as well as at firms Citadel and Goldman Sachs.
Hadrius is modernizing a compliance industry full of decades old technology and options.
“We’re finding that, similar to our experience, the existing software and options aren’t effectively removing a lot of the time and pain of meeting these SEC compliance obligations. The industry has been largely stagnant for decades, and firms have been delighted to learn how much more effortless, time-saving, and cost-effective Hadrius is compared to alternatives.”
According to the team, the long-term vision goes beyond the SEC, to run financial compliance for firms from asset managers to banks, where clients can be sure their firms are meeting their duties and firms can free up more resources towards meeting client needs across the industry.
