Tuesday, 02 January 2024 12:17 GMT

UAE financial crime firm Themis acquires UK fraud monitoring business Pasabi


(MENAFN- Edelman) Abu Dhabi, UAE – October 3, 2025 – Themis, a pioneer in the use of AI in the fight against financial crime and a certified B-Corp, today announces the acquisition of leading agentic AI fraud monitoring company Pasabi.
The transaction, recently approved under the UK Home Office National Security and Investment Act 2021, brings advanced AI technology and proven fraud combatting expertise into Themis, accelerating its product roadmap by several years. The acquisition embeds Pasabi’s Fraud Prevention platform into the Themis ecosystem. Themis’ platform now leverages AI, machine learning & behavioural analytics to combat fraud as well as all other forms of financial crime
Founded in 2017, Pasabi employs teams across the UK and Europe. The integration has already taken place, seamlessly, reflecting the two firms’ cultural alignment and shared mission to reduce the global impacts of financial crime. The deal was supported by Quadri Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in enterprise software companies globally.
With this acquisition, Themis immediately strengthens its AI first capabilities, bringing deep AI & financial crime expertise to the market, and its customer value proposition beyond its award-winning AML & CFT screening, investigations and monitoring platform to also now cover fraud detection, social media monitoring and transaction monitoring.
This announcement follows a suite of innovative product launches, including a KYC Customer Risk Calculator tool and end to end onboarding platform as well as the world’s first specialist LLM tackling financial crime: The Themis AI Investigator – unveiled at ADGM this September.
Why this matters:
• Financial crime is big business. According to latest UNODC figures, over 2.7% of global GDP is lost every year to Money Laundering and other forms of financial crime.
• National security is on the line – stopping criminals and organised crime from operating unchecked protects people, businesses and the natural world from systemic harm.
• Themis aims to reduce the deliberate and criminal exploitation of people, businesses and the environment by criminals and organised crime groups.
• AI is the tipping point – applied responsibly, it allows compliance to move beyond box-ticking and into real-time, proactive detection.
• By democratising due diligence and making it so easy for everyone to do both at work and at home, it becomes almost impossible for criminals to hide in the shadow economy without getting detected and reported to local law enforcement.
“Our mission has always been clear: to reduce the global impacts of financial crime,” said Dickon Johnstone, CEO of Themis. “This acquisition turbocharges that mission. By embedding AI at the core of our platform, we’re making it harder than ever for criminals to hide, and easier than ever for businesses to protect themselves and society. We are building the future of compliance – one that works for everyone.”
Chris James, Managing Partner of Quadri Ventures, commented:
“Themis has emerged as a leader in AI-driven financial crime prevention, combining deep expertise with strong and accelerating enterprise adoption. We are proud to back this acquisition, which significantly advances their fraud monitoring and behavioural analytics capabilities, and we look forward to supporting their next stage of growth.”
Commenting on the acquisition, Chris Downie, CEO and co-founder of Pasabi, said: “We’re thrilled to become part of Themis. Not only are we culturally aligned, with a shared devotion to combating fraud and financial crime, our platform is a perfect complement to Themis’ leading ecosystem. Advances in AI have changed the game and, if deployed well, are tipping the balance in favour of the crime fighters. Our proprietary fraud detection platform, deploying AI agents to be perpetually scanning for suspicious activity, combined with Themis’ proven leading suite of due diligence and AFC tools, will help businesses, NGOs and governments to protect themselves and their customers from criminal activity like never before.”

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Edelman

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