Singapore-based Merkle Science, a predictive crypto intelligence service with threat detection, risk mitigation, and compliance tools, raised a $24M+ Series A
The threat detection company added funding to its Series A round, which now totals more than $24 million.
Context & Ripple Effects
Merkle Science's $24M+ Series A lands on an established Singapore funding line for financial-risk AI: CashShield's $20M Temasek- and GGV-led fraud-detection round in 2018, Advance.ai's $80M Series C for bank-facing fraud scoring in 2019, and London-based Mimiro's $30M Series B as ComplyAdvantage for AI-driven financial-crime screening. What distinguishes this round is the target market — the tools are built specifically for crypto's threat-detection and compliance needs rather than general banking fraud.
That matters because crypto businesses are the buyers under the most pressure to prove they can detect illicit flows, and Merkle Science is positioning itself as the predictive intelligence layer they procure to do it.
First-order effects
- Merkle Science gains the capital to scale its threat-detection, risk-mitigation, and compliance tooling at a moment when crypto exchanges and financial institutions are actively shopping for exactly those capabilities.
- Crypto businesses facing tightening scrutiny gain a better-funded specialist vendor, reducing their reliance on general-purpose fraud tools repurposed for blockchain data.
Second-order effects
- Adjacent compliance vendors like ComplyAdvantage face pressure to extend their financial-crime screening into crypto-native risk signals or cede that segment to specialists like Merkle Science.
- The round reinforces investor appetite for Singapore-anchored security and risk-intelligence startups, making it easier for the next regional player in this category to raise at comparable scale.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, transaction-monitoring and illicit-flow intelligence becomes standard purchased infrastructure for digital-asset firms — a compliance layer every serious exchange and lender is expected to have, much like KYC tooling today.
- Singapore consolidates further as the neutral hub where financial-crime AI companies incorporate and raise, building on the CashShield–Advance.ai lineage of regionally headquartered risk startups.
The trend: Predictive risk-and-compliance intelligence is becoming a distinct, institutionally funded software category, with crypto as its fastest-growing buyer segment and Singapore as a leading base for the vendors serving it.