Building the global standard for identity and risk decisioning: why we invested in Monnai

WHY WE INVESTED:

MONNAI

We’re excited to welcome Pierre Demarche, Ravish Patel, and the entire Monnai team to the Motive Partners portfolio. From our earliest conversations, it was clear the team was tackling a foundational problem in modern financial services: how to establish trust and make risk decisions in a digital, global-first, and increasingly AI-driven world.

We’re proud to join Tiger Global, BTV, Commerce Ventures, 500 Global and other existing investors and partners to support Pierre and Ravish in building towards a category-defining global identity data platform.

The Problem

Trust at global scale is still broken

We have observed that as financial services, payments, and digital platforms expand across borders, identity and risk infrastructure have failed to keep pace. Legacy systems are fragmented, expensive, and heavily biased toward developed markets. In emerging economies in particular, millions of consumers and businesses remain under, or unscored, creating friction in onboarding, higher fraud losses, and missed opportunities for financial inclusion. The data needed is siloed, inconsistent, and hard to access.

At the same time, fraud is becoming more sophisticated, cross-border, and AI-enabled, pushing existing KYC, bureau, and document-based approaches beyond their limits. In parallel, consumer expectations for fast and seamless onboarding continue to grow.

The Solution

An AI powered global risk and identity infrastructure

Monnai is building a global risk and data infrastructure platform that enables businesses to make faster, more accurate decisions across the entire customer lifecycle, from onboarding to credit decisioning and collections. Through a single API, Monnai unifies telco data, digital footprint signals, financial attributes, and compliance data across 50+ markets enabling customers to partner with a single platform for global operations.

This approach gives fintechs, banks, and platforms the ability to verify users instantly, detect fraud earlier, and assess creditworthiness even in thin-file or underbanked populations. Over time, Monnai’s data consortium which aggregates anonymized signals from millions of transactions globally creates a powerful network effect that continuously improves accuracy, lowers cost, and strengthens defensibility as the platform scales.

Why We Invested

1. A global data network effect - Monnai has created one of the most scalable identity and risk intelligence infrastructures we’ve seen. The business model benefits from compounding performance as usage grows, signals improve, and more data is accessed creating a defensible flywheel of better insights, lower costs, and superior accuracy over time.
2. Founder-market fit Pierre and Ravish are exceptional founders for the space having spent decades building and scaling telco-data-driven identity solutions at TeleSign and BICS. Their ability to source, normalize, draw signal, and deploy data across hard-to-access markets like LATAM and APAC gives Monnai a clear edge compared to peers.
3. Exceptional traction with blue-chip partners - Monnai’s enterprise customers demonstrate exceptional retention metrics with many growing to be multi-million-dollar contracts, validating the strength of the product’s global coverage and technical performance.
4. Attractive economics and category momentum - Having crossed into 9-figure annualized revenue and realizing 5x annual revenue growth with a lean global team, Monnai demonstrates operational excellence that is rare at this early stage. As the market continues to see rapid expansion of financial access, globalization of platforms and proliferation of AI driven tooling across workflows, the demand for high-fidelity, low latency data to feed decisioning flows is growing exponentially. As a headless API, Monnai is perfectly positioned to serve any end-point and deliver critical decisioning intelligence across the financial services market and beyond.

“Monnai is building a critical foundational layer for the global financial services industry,” said Thomas Harris, Principal, Venture at Motive Partners. “Through combining hundreds of hard to access data sets with AI-driven intelligence, Monnai is becoming the go-to identity decisioning partner for global platforms. As AI enables accelerated software development cycles, we see increasing demand for high-fidelity data and growing value and differentiation in the complex underlying data infrastructure powering the application layer.”

We’re thrilled to support the team as they scale globally and help build a safer, more inclusive digital economy.  

To founders building at the intersection of wealthtech, private markets, and AI-native infrastructure - we’d love to hear from you.

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^{Motive Partners is a private investment firm exclusively focused on financial technology and technology enabled business services companies, ranging from early-stage ventures to growth equity and buyout, primarily based in North America and Europe. The firm invests across five primary subsectors: Banking & Payments; Capital Markets; AI, Data & Analytics; Insurance; and Wealth and Asset Management; and Motive Partners portfolio companies benefit from the firm’s fully integrated, proven Investor, Operator, Innovator (IOI) model, which brings together worldclass fintech leaders and capabilities with deep industry knowledge, insight and experience. With offices in New York City, London, and Berlin, Motive Partners delivers differentiated expertise, connectivity, and capabilities to create long-term value in financial technology companies. More information on Motive Partners can be found at www.motivepartners.com.}

^{Through our Venture platform, we focus on the next generation of wealthtech and private markets infrastructure, software that sits at the core of how capital is allocated, monitored, and reported. Family offices are front and center in this shift: they steward trillions in private wealth, are increasingly exposed to illiquid and alternative assets, and yet still run on tooling that was never built for their complexity. We believe this is an important modernization opportunity in financial services.}