Behavox has secured a $175 million preferred equity investment from funds and accounts managed by HPS Investment Partners, part of BlackRock, giving the AI-native controls platform additional capital for global expansion, product development and selective acquisitions.
The investment follows a period of commercial growth for the company, which says its customer base increased 86% over the past year to more than 100 major financial institutions across five continents. HPS joins existing institutional investors including SoftBank, Citigroup, Index Ventures and Hoxton Ventures.For Behavox, the transaction also reflects a wider shift in compliance technology towards broader control environments. Banks, asset managers, hedge funds and commodity firms are under pressure to consolidate risk controls, surveillance workflows and regulatory records across multiple communications, trading and archive systems.
“Behavox set out to give the world’s most demanding institutions a single, AI-native platform to manage risk and meet regulatory obligations,” says Erkin Adylov, Founder and CEO of Behavox. “HPS brings the scale, sophistication, and long-term perspective to help us reach more institutions in more markets. Their investment recognizes the strong platform we have built and positions us to pursue strategic acquisitions that expand our capabilities and accelerate global growth.”
The capital is intended to make that acquisition strategy more purposeful. “We are already delivering unified controls. This capital allows us to be more active and deliberate in our strategy – acquiring proven businesses in order to deliver greater value and a consolidated controls framework to our clients,” says Fahreen Kurji, Chief Customer Intelligence Officer at Behavox.
As part of the transaction, Behavox repaid and retired its $70 million venture-debt facility with Hercules Capital. That facility, secured in autumn 2024, supported strategic expansion, including the acquisition of Mosaic Smart Data and a strategic investment in b-next. Those moves expanded Behavox’s trade surveillance capabilities by adding fixed income, currencies and commodities front-office analytics and capital markets trade surveillance expertise.“Our partnership with Behavox has been highly successful,” says Ruslan Sergeyev, Managing Director at Hercules Capital. “We congratulate Behavox and HPS on this transaction and look forward to future opportunities to partner.”
Behavox says it has been profitable since 2023 and has used that position to reinvest in research and development, product expansion and international growth. The HPS transaction is its first equity financing since 2020, when SoftBank invested $100 million. The company says the business has since grown sevenfold, with SoftBank remaining a strategic partner and with SoftBank Investment Advisers in the UK and SoftBank Corporation in Japan also becoming customers.
A key focus for the new investment will be continued development of Polaris, Behavox’s trade surveillance product. Introduced in 2025, Polaris supports market abuse detection across 10 major asset classes and can operate independently or alongside Quantum, the company’s communications surveillance product. The combined workflow is designed to use agentic AI to bring related chats, emails, voice and archive records into a single case.
That positioning rests on a diagnosis of how institutions have built their surveillance functions. “The market continues to be riddled with siloed approaches to transaction monitoring, which means market participants have to continue investing in multiple trade surveillance solutions – reducing effectiveness and increasing cost,” says Kurji. “Behavox has taken deliberate steps to solve this. Polaris covers all ten major asset classes on a single AI-native platform.” The company reports that the Polaris pipeline has grown more than 80% since the start of the year.
Kurji frames the wider prize as commercial rather than purely a matter of cost. “The governance and controls market is at an inflection point. Clients are under real pressure to reduce vendor sprawl and consolidate their technology spend. But the real opportunity is bigger than cost – unblocking regulatory obstacles to enable business growth,” she says. “If you want to expand into any market, anywhere in the world, you need to demonstrate the right controls.”
Ardea Partners served as investment adviser to Behavox. Freshfields LLP acted as legal counsel, with the team led by London partner Rhys Evans and associates Jo Lee, Jennifer Okoye, Megan Rodgers and Jonathan Stelzer, with support from Ethan Klingsberg, Co-Head of US Corporate and M&A.
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