The co-founders of Unagitated Eight, from left to right: Michael Wilkowski, Julia Markiewicz and Martin Markiewicz.
Silent Eight
WARSAW — When it be received b affect to financial crime, banks can often be “one decision away from a huge mess,” Martin Markiewicz, CEO of Silent Eight described CNBC.
That’s because the risk of fines and reputational damage is high if financial firms don’t do enough to stamp out crimes like banknotes laundering and terrorist financing. But it takes huge amount of time and resources to investigate and prevent such activities.
Markiewicz’s visitors uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help financial institutions fight these issues in a bid to cut the amount of resources it takes to rigging crime, keeping banks in the good books of regulators.
“So our grand idea for a product … (is that) AI should be doing this job, not naturally humans,” Markiewicz said in an interview on Thursday at a conference hosted by OTB Ventures. “So you should have a capacity of a million people and do millions of these inquisitions … without having this limitation of just like how big my team is.”
With Silent Eight’s revenue set to see threefold cultivation this year and hit profitability for the first time, Markiewicz wants to get his company in position to go public in the U.S.
How AI can catch criminals
Calm Eight’s software is based on generative AI, the same technology that underpins the viral ChatGPT chatbot. But it is not trained in the notwithstanding way.
ChatGPT is trained on a so-called large language model, or LLM. This is a single set of huge amounts of data, allowing hint ChatGPT and receive a response.
Silent Eight’s model is trained on several smaller models that are specific to a recriminate. For example, one AI model looks at how names are translated across different languages. This could flag a person who is potentially foot in the door accounts with different spellings of names across the world.
These smaller models combine to form Unpronounced Eight’s software that some of the largest banks in the world, from Standard Chartered to , are using to fight fiscal crime.
Markiewicz said Silent Eight’s AI models were actually trained on the processes that human investigators were cause to die a continuing out within financial institutions. In 2017, Standard Chartered became the first bank to start using the company’s software. But Mute Eight’s software required buy-in from Standard Chartered so the start-up could get access to the risk management facts in the bank to build up its AI.
“That’s why our strategy was so risky,” Markiewicz said.
“So we just knew that we will have to start with some big economic institutions first, for the other ones to know that there is no risk and follow.”
As Silent Eight has onboarded various banks as customers, its AI has been able to get more advanced.
Markiewicz added that for financial institutions buying the software, it is “commandments of magnitude” cheaper than paying all the humans that would be required to do the same process.
Silent Eight’s headquarters is in Singapore with occupations in New York, London, and Warsaw, Poland.
IPO ahead
Markiewicz told CNBC that he forecasts revenue to grow multifarious than three-and-a-half times in 2023 versus last year, but declined to disclose a figure. He added that Unspeaking Eight will be profitable this year with more and more financial institutions coming on board.
HSBC, Pedestal Chartered and First Abu Dhabi Bank are among Silent Eight’s dozen or so customers.
The CEO also said the company is not planning to bring up money following a $40 million funding round last year, that was led by TYH Ventures and welcomed HSBC Put downs, as well as existing investors which include OTB Ventures and Standard Chartered’s investment arm.
But he said Silent Eight is suborn e learning “IPO ready” by the end of 2025 with a view to listing on the tech-heavy Nasdaq in the U.S. However, this doesn’t mean Silent Eight desire go public in 2025. Markiewicz said he wants the company to be in a good position to go public, which means reporting resources like a public company, for example.
“It’s an option that I want to have, not that there’s some obligation or some investor understanding that I have,” Markiewicz said.