• Kobalt Labs raised $13M to automate risk operations at banks and fintechs.
  • Here's the founder story, how the platform works, and why the timing is right.

The Apple Pay Moment That Built a Compliance Startup

Kalyani Ramadurgam was working at Apple, responsible for a task that sounded straightforward: prevent individuals on terrorism watch lists from accessing Apple Pay. The stakes were existential. The method was medieval.

"It meant reading through not just hundreds, but thousands of pages of documentation," she recalled in a Forbes interview following her recognition on the 30 Under 30 2026 list in Finance. "Organizations were just throwing bodies at the problem."

Even at one of the most technologically advanced companies on the planet, the processes responsible for keeping financial products compliant were manual, slow, and brittle. For Ramadurgam, an AI researcher with a Stanford MS in Computer Science, this was not a gap she could unsee. In 2023, she left Apple and co-founded Kobalt Labs with Ashi Agrawal, a Stanford engineer who had previously built infrastructure at Affirm, Nuna, and Meta. The question they set out to answer: why is the financial system still solving a data problem with headcount?

The Problem Nobody Talks About in Fintech

Third-party risk management is one of the most overlooked cost centers in banking and financial services. Every time a bank onboards a new fintech partner, a vendor, or a payment processor, it must assess that entity's compliance posture — checking regulatory status, reviewing contracts against internal policies, verifying infosec standards, and monitoring for changes over time.

For community banks and sponsor banks, who underwrite the compliance burden for the fintechs that run on their rails, this has become an existential bottleneck. The surge in banking-as-a-service partnerships over the last five years has multiplied the number of third parties each institution must manage. Regulatory scrutiny from bodies like the OCC and FDIC has increased simultaneously. The result: compliance teams are overwhelmed, and the backlog of unreviewed vendor relationships is a material risk sitting quietly on every bank's balance sheet.

Most fintechs face the mirror image of this problem. Getting a bank to complete partner diligence is notoriously slow — weeks or months of document exchanges, questionnaire responses, and back-and-forth. It is frequently the longest part of a launch timeline, and it has nothing to do with product.

What Kobalt Labs Actually Does

Kobalt Labs develops an AI-powered risk copilot that automates risk operations, compliance, and partner diligence for financial institutions. The platform works by ingesting an institution's internal policies, past compliance assessments, vendor contracts, and regulatory documents, then surfacing risks automatically when something conflicts with those inputs.

The product has three primary modules. The vendor risk module handles third-party diligence end-to-end — reviewing new partner contracts against internal policies, flagging clause-level conflicts, and monitoring relationships for regulatory changes over time. The infosec module extracts relevant security posture information from vendor questionnaires and suggests next steps for review. The legal module identifies missing clauses and risky language in agreements instantly, reducing the time legal and compliance teams spend on document review.

"Initial benchmarking shows that our platform boosts internal diligence capacity by over 4 times, increases real-time regulatory coverage and aligns with evidence required during audit periods," Ramadurgam said. Fintechs that use Kobalt complete partner diligence in approximately one-tenth of the traditional time.

The platform covers regulatory requirements across privacy, lending, money movement, BSA/AML, ACH, and more — automatically updating its monitoring as regulations evolve, which means institutions stay continuously compliant without manual tracking.

From YC to $13 Million and 20 Clients

Kobalt Labs was part of the Y Combinator Summer 2023 batch. They demoed at FinovateSpring 2024 with $1.6 million raised and design partnerships already in place with multiple fintechs. The growth since has been substantial.

Kobalt Labs has secured $13 million in funding and now serves over 20 clients, including Celtic Bank and the rapidly expanding fintech Bilt. In December 2025, the company closed an $11 million Series A. They joined the NayaOne Tech Marketplace in August 2024, giving them distribution into NayaOne's network of financial institutions evaluating fintech solutions. A partnership with Treasury Prime, one of the leading embedded banking software providers, brought Kobalt's compliance tooling directly into Treasury Prime's bank network.

The client profile spans community banks, regional banks, sponsor banks, and fintechs — institutions that share the same compliance bottleneck but approach it from different sides of the table. The insight that Kobalt can serve both simultaneously is structurally clever: the bank and the fintech both need the same underlying data processed, just with different outputs. Kobalt becomes the shared infrastructure layer between them.

Why Fintech Compliance Is an AI Problem Worth Solving

The timing is not coincidental. Regulatory pressure on bank-fintech partnerships intensified significantly between 2023 and 2025, following high-profile collapses in the banking-as-a-service space. Regulators made clear that sponsor banks cannot outsource compliance responsibility to their fintech partners — they remain on the hook for every entity on their platform. That shift forced dozens of community banks to either scale their compliance teams or find a technology solution.

Kobalt Labs positioned itself for the second path. The alternative — hiring compliance analysts at $80,000–$120,000 a year to manually review vendor contracts — is both expensive and unscalable. An AI system that reads faster, monitors continuously, and doesn't get fatigued during document reviews is structurally superior for this task. The model aligns well with enterprise AI's most proven use case: replacing repetitive, high-volume document processing with automated reasoning.

For Indian fintechs and neobanks eyeing US market entry or partnerships with US sponsor banks, Kobalt's existence matters practically. The compliance friction of entering a US banking partnership is one of the most cited barriers. Tools that compress that timeline from months to weeks are infrastructure for the corridor play.

Bottom Line

Kobalt Labs is solving a structural problem that has no good solution without AI — manual compliance review at scale is simply not viable as partner volumes grow. With $13 million raised, 20+ clients, a Forbes 30 Under 30 founder, and a December 2025 Series A closing, the company has moved well beyond its early-stage positioning. The question now is whether it can expand from community banks into larger financial institutions, where the compliance problem is bigger but the sales cycle is longer.

Edited By Nabarun