Wavemaker Partners celebrates 10 years this year. As we grew into the venture capital firm we are today, we wanted to look back on businesses we invested in. Silent Eight was one of our first portfolio companies, with a relationship that dates back to 2015. What we have believed in for 10 years, we now know to be true–Silent Eight and its founding team are a great example of what we mean when we say “Investing in people, not just the technology.”
Martin Markiewicz is the CEO and founder of Silent Eight, an AI-based platform that automates decision-making to accurately spot financial crime before it happens. He sports the ultimate beard and a mohawk. When we caught up with this story, he asked if he should change his death-metal t-shirt.
Just picture him sitting around with global banking security and compliance officers discussing anti-money
laundering.
The three co-founders Julia Markiewicz, Michael Wilkowski, and Martin have been working together for nearly 20 years. Previous to crime prevention, they built one of the biggest multidisciplinary engineering companies in Poland, winning contracts to build hydropower plants in Warsaw. After SevenFlow Investments’ highly successful IPO, they decided to return back to their IT roots and build software as their next venture.
Martin met Paul Santos, Wavemaker’s Managing Partner, through Singapore’s JFDI incubator program.
I remember Paul said he was looking for the most boring B2B company. And that was us," Martin laughs.
Paul was intrigued.
“At the time they were building essentially an AI search platform for enterprise, so you could search and find information within an organization. It might not sound like a big deal now, but at the time, AI was new, and even more new for Singapore.”
While solving for information search within a potential client in the banking sector, they were pointed to an even bigger problem.
“Two plus trillion dollars around the world is being laundered, and only less than 1% a year is being seized,” Martin starts.
Thousands of people in a single financial institution would work on financial crime prevention. It fell on the banks to implement, monitor, adjudicate, then report each transaction in accordance with the financial crime and terrosim financing regulations. But it wasn’t working. Banks were being fined for non-compliance. According to a report published in 2022 by Financial Crime News, since the start of the 21st century, a total of US$38.47 billion in material fines was being levied across 57 banks under such money laundering rules.
Martin and his team needed to decide whether to abandon their current search product or pivot.
They would need to be “a thousand times better” immediately. There was no time for beta-testing with smaller banks. They needed to market to the biggest global financial institutions and unveil tech that worked flawlessly from the beginning. They were right to hesitate–this perfection approach is the opposite of what every other VC would bet on. It means risk; no feedback on market fit; and a lot more time and patience for an investment to mature.
To Paul, this was an “easy decision.”
“Banks are a very hard sector to market into. They are untrusting. They have a lot to lose. So for a bank to ask this AI startup from Singapore for help, was already a sign of just how big this problem is.”
Paul became curious about the bank’s outlier behavior to ask a pivoting startup for help. Curiosity led to clarity–he saw how big the ALM problem was, how costly the fines were, but how no one was solving it with AI yet. Even the Monetary Authority of Singapore approved of the strategy and was showing support. He also trusted Martin, Julia, and Michael’s collective experience and their own insight to do what they had already proven they could do–build large scale, long-term infrastructure that demanded near perfection.
Fast forward to today.
Silent Eight had just celebrated its 9-year anniversary. Standard Chartered has publicly announced that they are implementing Silent Eight’s technology platform to aid in financial crime prevention, which was recently followed by HSBC’s own announcement of their multi-year partnership with the company. Julia (current COO) was named Europe’s Top 25 Women Leaders in Financial Technology. The company has doubled in size, with offices in Warsaw, New York, London, and its headquarters in Singapore. Their tech ‘Iris’ is deployed in over 150 markets.
“In that zero to one stage of a company, there are a million things that can happen,” says Paul.
“But in the humble, honest search for compelling industry and/or technology, insights can lead to unexpected, scalable, value-creating businesses.”
As Wavemaker celebrates 10 years of investing in Southeast Asia, this story has been an important reminder of how we found our method in our decision-making process. We make a decision on what a company could be, and invest on that premise. But what a company will be is very much determined by the founder. And their insights and experience is where we put our trust in.
