Tech Start-up Founded by Wadham Alumnus secures $3M from Google's Early-Stage AI Fund

Wadham alumnus, Rhim Shah, is CEO and co-founder of Arva AI, a technology company that has recently secured $3 million in funding. The company offers AI solutions for streamlining how financial institutions verify businesses.

Business verification, or Know Your Business (KYB), is required by financial institutions to comply with regulations and to reduce the risk of fraud or money laundering. These checks are critical, but traditionally, they rely on hundreds of compliance analysts manually reviewing fragments of data across multiple sources. This is costly and slows down the onboarding of legitimate business customers.

The end goal for Arva AI is to have a suite of AI enabled checks that can handle all repetitive manual compliance work for banks and fintechs. As Rhim explains, “Our mission at Arva is to use AI to make the business verification process fast, accurate, and robust. Verification should be seamless and secure, which is essential for banks and fintechs in a world where costs are rising, and regulations are getting stricter.”

Pursuing entrepreneurship put Rhim on a less typical path for an Oxford graduate in engineering. “Half of my engineering cohort is in finance or consulting,” Rhim shares, “however, Oxford is starting to show great signs of pushing students towards entrepreneurship.” Wadham has played a part in this by running its Planet Positive Lab climate tech accelerator, and by facilitating a network of entrepreneurial alumni, where Rhim found “a space where I connected with like-minded individuals.”

In was during his studies at Wadham that Rhim launched his first startup: Carbon Codes, which encouraged sustainable eating. Rhim says that “being surrounded by such driven peers constantly inspired me to aim higher.” He also benefited from degree modules in entrepreneurship that “gave me the practical tools and confidence to turn ideas into action.”

After finishing his studies, Rhim wanted to find a workplace that would further equip him for business ventures. “I knew I needed some additional experience in a high-growth environment, where worldclass products were built.” This desire led him to Revolut, the British multinational fintech company, where he led the financial crime product team for Revolut Business. “Revolut’s culture is ripe for entrepreneurship,” Rhim explains, “it highly values ownership and speed.” Sure enough, it wasn’t long before Rhim embodied that spirit by founding Arva AI.

Rhim explains that “Arva” means "Strength" in Arabic, symbolising stability and resilience, and “Fast” in Sanskrit, connoting versatility and power. The company’s initial founding was backed by Y Combinator, the startup accelerator behind success stories like AirBnB, Stripe, Coinbase, OpenAI and more. The latest $3 million funding round was led by Gradient, Google’s highly sought early-stage AI fund.

Rhim would like to see more start-ups emerge from, and receive backing from within, the UK. He sees many British entrepreneurs moving to the US to access capital and believes that “a greater risk-taking culture” is needed from investors on this side of the Atlantic.

It's no secret that AI is currently in an explosive period of technological development and financial investment. It’s a space that Rhim describes as “exciting but noisy!” adding that AI models continue to dramatically improve: “every few weeks there is something groundbreaking that was previously thought impossible.” He counsels, however, to remember that AI is just a means to create value and solve problems; “the value isn't in AI itself, but how AI can be used.”

Wadham congratulates Rhim on the successful funding round and hopes to see Arva AI continue to grow.