Joshua Howland built his last startup into a payments processor handling $1 billion in annual volume within 15 months. Now he's after a less glamorous problem: compliance officers drowning in busywork they never wanted to do in the first place.
Hickory, Howland's Salt Lake City venture, emerged from Y Combinator with an AI platform aimed at bank and fintech compliance teams—specifically those juggling Bank Secrecy Act obligations and the mounting paperwork that comes with sponsor-bank relationships. The pitch is straightforward: automate the assembly work so analysts can focus on decisions that actually require human judgment. Whether that translates to the "10x productivity" the company claims remains to be seen, but Howland insists the market is there.
"Every team I've worked with was already behind on the work that actually needs their judgment," he wrote in a LinkedIn post in late September. "This isn't about needing fewer compliance people."
That positioning may prove strategic. Regulators have spent the past two years tightening scrutiny on bank-fintech partnerships, and sponsor banks are feeling it. Community banks face big-bank compliance mandates without big-bank budgets. Fintechs managing reporting obligations to their sponsor partners are hiring for roles that didn't exist five years ago. Into that gap, Hickory is selling something that sounds almost mundane: faster data pulls, automated case assembly, and a knowledge base tuned to each institution's specific rulebook.
The product's Analyst Studio feature, according to the company's website, handles data requests that historically took weeks and returns answers in minutes. Automated workflows collapse four-hour investigations into ten-minute reviews by pulling transaction data, applying institutional acceptance criteria, and drafting findings for a human to approve or reject. There's also a tailored knowledge base, which the company says answers regulatory questions specific to each bank's policies rather than offering generic industry guidance.
Hickory says it's running inside banks today, though the company hasn't named customers publicly and declined to share contract values or revenue figures.
Howland previously served as president and CTO at Seis, his Y Combinator Winter 2022 company, and spent time at Zions Bancorporation before that. For this venture, he brought in Scott Grow, a Certified Regulatory Compliance Manager with more than two decades inside industrial banks and their fintech partners, and Kevin Anderson, a principal engineer with long experience in banking systems. The trio raised a $500,000 convertible note in early September, primarily from Y Combinator, with backing from Salt VC, Album, Convoi Ventures, and a roster of angel investors including Sam Hodges, Trevor McKendrick, and Justin Mares.
They're hardly alone. The market for AI-powered compliance tools has become crowded in the past year, with both legacy vendors and nimble startups racing to deploy what the industry now calls "agentic AI"—systems that don't just flag suspicious activity but take investigative steps on their own.
Fiserv launched agentOS in May. FIS partnered with Anthropic on a Financial Crimes AI Agent, with BMO and Amalgamated Bank testing the system and broader availability expected later this year. Oscilar unveiled Agent Hub in June with more than 30 AI agents across fraud, anti-money laundering, credit, and onboarding. Nasdaq Verafin introduced its Agentic AI Workforce last year and has been expanding the offering. Unit21 released an Agentic Task Builder in July that lets compliance teams write investigation logic in plain English. Smaller players like Comply and Hummingbird have rolled out similar tools.
The timing raises questions about differentiation. Hickory emphasizes exam readiness—every action logged, sources cited, single-tenant virtual private cloud deployment—and points to a third-party security assessment in September that scored the platform 86 out of 100 for production readiness. Privacy scored well; security controls including Content-Security-Policy and HSTS headers scored lower at the time of measurement. The company says it's addressing those gaps.
What Hickory has that some competitors don't is Grow's two decades inside the institutions it's trying to sell to. That experience may matter more than the technology itself, particularly in an industry where trust is earned in years, not product demos.
The startup is scheduled to present at Y Combinator's Demo Day in early December, where it will pitch institutional investors ahead of what's likely to be a seed round. The company's careers page lists no open roles. For now, it's three people trying to convince an industry that the thing it needs isn't fewer compliance officers but better tools for the ones it has.
