Elliptic Raises $120M From Nasdaq and Deutsche Bank to Build AI Compliance Tools

Elliptic has raised $120 million in a Series D round led by One Peak, with new participation from Nasdaq Ventures, Deutsche Bank and the British Business Bank, alongside continued backing from existing investors AlbionVC, Evolution Equity Partners and JPMorgan. The round values the London-based blockchain analytics firm at $670 million and reflects the growing institutional appetite for compliance infrastructure as crypto, stablecoins and tokenised assets push deeper into traditional finance.

Two Thirds of Global Crypto Volume Already Touches Elliptic

Elliptic was founded in 2013 and provides transaction monitoring, sanctions screening and risk analysis tools to banks, crypto exchanges, fintechs and government agencies. The company says two thirds of global crypto trading volume flows through exchanges that already use its services. Its software tracks wallet activity across dozens of blockchains and flags addresses linked to ransomware, sanctions, fraud and other illicit finance.

That infrastructure has become significantly more valuable as the regulatory environment tightens. The EU's MiCA framework now requires comprehensive risk monitoring across crypto-asset service providers. US guidance from the Federal Reserve, OCC and FDIC has formalised expectations that banks holding tokenised securities maintain equivalent compliance standards to traditional asset custody. The result is a market where institutions are not buying blockchain analytics out of curiosity, they are buying it because regulators expect it.

Elliptic Is Building AI Agents to Replace Manual Compliance Work

The headline focus for the new funding is what Elliptic CEO Simone Maini called the company's "agentic product roadmap" in an interview with CoinDesk. The plan involves building AI agents that sit on top of Elliptic's existing transaction dataset and automate compliance tasks that currently consume large amounts of analyst time.

The pitch addresses a structural problem in financial crime compliance. Bank compliance teams spend significant time on repetitive tasks like reviewing low-risk alerts, gathering counterparty information and producing investigation reports. AI agents capable of handling that workload free up human analysts for the high-judgement work that actually catches sophisticated criminal activity. The same logic is driving similar AI investments at Chainalysis, TRM Labs and other Elliptic competitors, all of whom are positioning themselves as the default analytics layer for institutional crypto.

The Backers Tell You Where Crypto Compliance Is Heading

The investor list is the more telling detail than the funding amount. Nasdaq Ventures, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, the British Business Bank and One Peak are not betting on Elliptic in isolation, they are betting that crypto compliance becomes a structural cost line item for the entire global financial system over the next decade. Nasdaq is building out its own digital asset infrastructure. Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan are among the largest banks running tokenisation pilots. The British Business Bank participation suggests UK government interest in keeping a national champion in crypto compliance technology.

That alignment of strategic and financial backers makes Elliptic's growth path more than just a startup funding story. Stablecoins moved $33 trillion in transaction volume last year, according to figures the company shared with CoinDesk. Tokenised assets are scaling rapidly across both regulated and decentralised infrastructure. Each new piece of that ecosystem creates additional compliance surface area, and Elliptic is positioning itself to be the analytics layer that monitors all of it.