Active.ai vs Sift

Sift has a disclosed valuation of $1B, while Active.ai's valuation is not publicly available, making a direct size comparison difficult. Sift employs 400 people.

Sift has raised more in total funding at $162M, compared to Active.ai's $11M — a gap of $151M. Combined, the two companies have completed 5 known funding rounds.

Sift holds the higher Awaira Score at 61/100, compared to Active.ai's 50/100. The Awaira Score is a composite metric factoring in valuation, funding, stage, team size, and market presence — a 11-point gap that reflects meaningful differences in scale or traction.

Active.ai was founded by Ravi Shankar in 2016. Sift was founded by Jason Tan in 2011. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

Active.ai: Active.ai builds conversational AI solutions specifically for retail banking and financial services, enabling banks to deploy intelligent virtual assistants for account inquiries, transaction analysis, loan servicing, and customer onboarding through mobile and messaging channels. The platform is designed to integrate with core banking systems and comply with financial services regulations across multiple jurisdictions.\n\nThe company raised approximately $11M in Series A funding and counts regional banks, cooperative financial institutions, and digital neobanks among its customers in India and Southeast Asia. Active.ai's banking-specific NLP models are trained on financial domain terminology, reducing hallucination risk in regulated customer-facing interactions.\n\nThe digital banking transformation in India, accelerated by UPI and the JAM trinity, has created strong demand for AI-assisted banking interfaces that can serve the next 300 million users entering the formal financial system. Active.ai's banking-native design positions it as a credible alternative to expensive custom development or generic chatbot platforms that require extensive financial domain customization. Sift: Sift is an AI-powered fraud prevention and digital trust platform founded in 2011, headquartered in the USA. The company specializes in identifying and preventing fraudulent transactions, account abuse, and payment fraud for digital commerce businesses. Its core platform uses machine learning algorithms to analyze user behavior patterns, transaction data, and device information in real-time, enabling merchants and financial services companies to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent activity. Sift's primary products include fraud detection APIs, chargeback management tools, and account abuse prevention systems. The platform processes billions of transactions and events annually, building predictive models from this data to improve detection accuracy over time. The company serves e-commerce platforms, payment processors, financial institutions, and subscription services globally. With $162M in total funding and a $1.0B valuation, Sift operates at Series E stage, indicating substantial market traction and investor confidence. The company competes in the broader fraud prevention and fintech security sector alongside players like Stripe Radar, PayPal's fraud tools, and specialized fraud detection vendors. Its competitive positioning centers on machine learning sophistication, real-time processing capabilities, and integration flexibility for digital commerce ecosystems. Sift has maintained consistent growth since its inception, expanding its customer base and product capabilities to address evolving fraud threats in digital commerce environments. Sift combines behavioral analytics with machine learning to provide real-time fraud detection at scale for digital commerce platforms.

Sift was founded first in 2011, giving it 5 years of additional market experience. Active.ai was founded later in 2016. In AI, even a year or two of head start can translate into significantly more training data, customer relationships, and institutional knowledge.

Active.ai has approximately 50-200 employees, while Sift has approximately 400. A larger team often signals higher revenue or venture backing, but in AI, smaller teams are increasingly capable of building at scale.

Yes, Active.ai and Sift are direct competitors — both operate in the AI Finance space and likely target overlapping customer segments. This comparison is especially relevant for buyers evaluating both platforms.