Behavox

Overview

Behavox is an artificial-intelligence surveillance company that sells compliance software to banks, asset managers, hedge funds, and other regulated financial firms. Its platform aggregates and analyzes employees’ internal communications — email, instant messaging, voice — and applies machine learning to flag compliance violations, insider threats, and bad conduct such as harassment (Global Venturing). Founded in 2014, the company has raised two headline rounds: $100 million from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 in 2020 and $175 million from HPS Investment Partners, part of BlackRock, in 2026 (Reuters; Financial IT). What distinguishes Behavox’s funding story is who did the due diligence: its biggest backer was already a customer before it became an investor.

The founder: from trading floors to surveillance

Erkin Adylov is the founder and CEO of Behavox (Milken Institute). Before founding the company in 2014, he worked at the top of the industry his software now monitors: first as an equities analyst at Goldman Sachs, then as a partner at Man GLG, the investment management firm (Milken Institute). He had also co-founded or invested in three startup businesses before Behavox (Milken Institute). Under his leadership, Behavox was included in the Forbes FinTech 50, the CB Insights AI 100, and Tech Nation’s Future 50 program, and was recognized by Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud for its AI and machine-learning work (Milken Institute).

The early financing was modest and entirely venture-driven. Behavox raised $400,000 from unnamed investors in 2014 and another $1 million the following year, then an undisclosed Series A co-led by Hoxton Ventures and Promus Ventures in 2016, followed by a $20 million Series A1 round in 2017 led by financial-services firm Citigroup and backed by Index Ventures (Global Venturing).

The customer who became the investor

The SoftBank deal of February 2020 is the company’s defining financing. SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund 2 invested $100 million in Behavox in the form of preferred shares, valuing the company at about $500 million, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Reuters; the investment group was also to be represented on Behavox’s board (Reuters). The deal was among the first for the second incarnation of SoftBank’s Vision Fund, at a moment when SoftBank was facing investor scrutiny over the WeWork and Uber setbacks (Reuters). Adylov and key employees remained the largest shareholders after the round (Reuters).

What makes the round unusual is that SoftBank had already stress-tested the product. Reuters listed SoftBank Investment Advisers among Behavox’s customers — alongside banks, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, and private equity firms — at the time of the investment (Reuters). SoftBank Investment Advisers managing partner Munish Varma told Global Venturing: “We have experienced the incredible insights and sophisticated analysis of the Behavox platform and are firm believers in their mission to organise all corporate communications data on earth to add value for successful companies” (Global Venturing). The investor was, in other words, converting its own procurement into equity.

From comms surveillance to a unified controls platform

For six years after the SoftBank round, Behavox took no new equity. The company says it has been profitable since 2023, and it funded expansion partly with debt: a $70 million venture-debt facility from Hercules Capital secured in autumn 2024, used to support strategic expansion including the acquisition of Mosaic Smart Data and a strategic investment in b-next (Financial IT). Those transactions pushed Behavox beyond its original communications-surveillance product into trade surveillance — adding fixed-income, currencies, and commodities analytics expertise (Financial IT).

In 2025 the company introduced Polaris, described as a next-generation trade-surveillance platform supporting market-abuse detection across all 10 major asset classes on a single AI-native platform, operating independently or alongside its Quantum communications-surveillance product, using agentic AI to pull related chats, emails, voice, and archive records into a single case (Financial IT).

The HPS investment of June 2026 completed the transformation. The $175 million in preferred equity — Behavox’s first equity financing since 2020 — was positioned to accelerate global growth, expand the “Unified Controls Platform,” and fund acquisitions (Financial IT). HPS joined a cap table that already included SoftBank, Citigroup, Index Ventures, and Hoxton Ventures (Financial IT). As part of the transaction, Behavox fully repaid and retired the $70 million Hercules debt facility, and the company reported its customer base had grown 86% to more than 100 major financial institutions across five continents — with SoftBank Investment Advisers in the UK and SoftBank Corporation in Japan among its customers (Financial IT).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not assert a single settled headquarters city — Global Venturing described Behavox as US-based in 2020 (Global Venturing), the 2026 funding announcement as republished by Financial IT is datelined London & Montreal (Financial IT), and the Milken Institute notes founder Erkin Adylov resides in New York City (Milken Institute); the variation is flagged as an open item. It does not independently verify the company’s commercial claims — “profitable since 2023,” 86% customer growth, the 100-institution figure, and the Mosaic Smart Data acquisition details all come from the company’s statements as reported by Financial IT, not from audited accounts (Financial IT). It does not state the terms of the 2026 HPS preferred equity beyond what was announced — no valuation was disclosed in the announcement as republished (Financial IT). It does not repeat product marketing claims about detection accuracy or false-positive rates, which appear only in company materials excluded by this profile’s sourcing policy.