Israeli startup Next Dim’s AI-powered technology automates discovery of suspicious patterns within large networks of financial transactions. It can also identify when social networks are being manipulated and help corporates and states better understand whether they are targeted by hostile influence campaigns. Next Dim’s clients include medium to large financial institutions, payment companies , credit card companies, crypto exchanges as well as central banks, tax authorities, law enforcement, homeland security and defense agencies.
“Next Dim’s mission is to enable a paradigm shift in the way organizations derive insights and intelligence from financial and social interactions,” says Yochai Elani, Next Dim’s Chief Operations Officer. “This will position us to be a leader in detection and investigations of financial crimes such as money laundering and terror financing within banking and financial transactions, payment infrastructures, and blockchains, as well as identifying hostile influence campaigns across social networks.”
The company’s differentiators include its team. The company’s CEO Netta Marrom has a history of executive roles in the banking industry. He is a former executive vice president of international finance and IT audit at Israel’s Bank Hapoalim, among others. A former commander in the Israeli Intelligence Corps Main Technological Unit, Marrom is skilled in forensic and investigative audit, cybersecurity and financial regulations.
Chairman, Dan Koller, is one of Israel’s leading bankers. He served as Bank Hapolim’s former head of finance, head of international banking, and chief risk officer. He also served as Chairman of the Board of Isracard and Chairman of the Board of Poalim Capital Markets.
Next Dim’s competitors include Nice Actimize, which also targets financial crime with AI and machine learning and Cyabra, which uncovers fake profiles, harmful narratives, and GenAI content.
Elani says Next Dim hasunique technology that covers both financial transactions and social media and the only one to give a Top-Down view. “Most of our competitors will look at certain account and focus on specific users or bots,” he says. “We do it differently. We can look at the world of interactions – networks with 100s of millions of nodes and billions of transactions – from the top down,” he says. “We are looking for complex structures, for example an NGO which is transacting with the laundry shop, the supermarket and the butcher in order to launder money, but they also create a structure that has no financial logic. This is what makes us different. We have a holistic view and understanding of the connections and flow of funds. and the same is true for social media: we can help an organization detect hostile influence platforms and what is inauthentic, investigate it,and provide evidence.”
Next Dim started out by specializing in identifying financial crime. It branched out into social media during COVID – In a June 2020 story about Twitter being manipulated to amplify pro-Beijing messages, The New York Times reported that Next Dim discovered two mundane-looking tweets praising China’s coronavirus response that were liked and reposted hundreds of thousands of times in March, possibly with the help of strategically placed influencer accounts.
The company uses a software-as-a-service business model. Companies that buy a license can install Next Dim’s software on their servers or cloud and integrate it in their work environment to track patterns and create efficient processes. An investigation in Next-Dim’s platform can be triggered both by information arriving from an external source or by an irregular pattern automatically discovered by the system. In both cases the investigation process and tools are the same. Next-dim can also supply services to its customers by providing the analysis.
Next Dim is active in Israel and Europe and plans to expand globally. It is one of 10 startups participating in DRISHTI, short for Dual Use Robust India Israel High Tech Innovation, a new program launched by Israel’s Defense Research and Development Directorate (DDR&D) and T-Hub, India’s largest startup accelerator to help dual use tech companies enter the India market, with the support of the Motwani Jadeja Foundation.
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