Joe Robinson is co-founder and chief executive of Hummingbird, the company that gives financial crime investigators at banks and fintechs one workspace for cases, customer profiles, and regulatory filings. He started it after watching compliance teams fight money laundering with tools that were never built for them.
Risk at Square and Circle
Robinson worked in product at Square and then ran risk and data science for about two years at Circle, the blockchain payments company. At Circle he saw why global anti-money laundering controls succeed less than 1% of the time: plenty of data sources, risk signals, and algorithms, but no easy way to weave them together for an investigation.
Building a CRM for Investigators
He co-founded Hummingbird with a team drawn about half from Square and half from Circle. Financial crime investigators typically work 100 to 200 cases a week, and the founders set out to build a specialized CRM for compliance and risk teams. In July 2020 Flourish Ventures led an $8.2 million Series A, with Stripe alumni among the backers, when the company was eight people.
In December 2021 Battery Ventures led a $30 million Series B, joined by Plaid co-founder William Hockey, bringing total funding to $41.8 million. By then the team had grown to 35, and customers included Stripe, Coinbase, Evolve Bank & Trust, Upgrade, and Etsy. The product had grown from AML into lending complaints, transaction disputes, and customer onboarding.
Hummingbird Today
Hummingbird now adds AI agents and an agent orchestration platform to its case workspace, so analysts and agents work cases together, and it competes with Unit21, Lucinity, and Flagright. Robinson has said the platform is designed to augment the technology institutions already run instead of replacing it.
The idea goes back to his years at Circle, when the data was all there and the investigators still missed the whole picture. His company exists to give them that picture.
