London-based FinTech startup Zango AI has come out of stealth mode with a significant €4 million seed funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners, a prominent global venture capital firm managing over €2.2 billion. This fresh capital injection is intended to fuel the expansion of Zango’s international teams, particularly in London and Bengaluru, and to accelerate the development of advanced product modules within its AI-native Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) platform. The startup also plans to broaden its reach beyond banking into other financial service sectors such as insurance and asset management.

Founded in 2024 by Ritesh Singhania and Shashank Agarwal, Zango AI specialises in solving the complex challenge of regulatory compliance for global financial institutions. Unlike traditional SaaS compliance tools that primarily address KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) requirements, Zango deploys AI-powered agents that continuously monitor regulatory changes through horizon scanning, perform real-time gap analyses, and automate controls testing. This approach helps firms stay audit-ready without relying on time-consuming manual processes buried in spreadsheets. The platform is designed to make compliance as intuitive as a simple query—for example, a business can quickly determine the requirements for launching a lending product in a particular market.

Zango’s technology utilises regulatory-domain large language models (LLMs) to interpret and integrate regulatory updates directly into a firm’s operations. The AI agents work hand-in-hand with human experts to ensure accuracy and reliability, providing a hybrid model that combines cutting-edge automation with essential human oversight. The startup underscores its approach as one that delivers concrete results rather than just software, helping it compete effectively against traditional consultants.

The company’s leadership brings extensive experience in FinTech and regulatory technology. Ritesh Singhania previously founded ClearGlass, a pension compliance platform, and has held senior technology roles in NASDAQ-listed companies. Co-founder Shashank Agarwal has a track record in AI-driven fraud detection and compliance engineering, having co-founded Third Watch (acquired by Razorpay) and contributed to compliance operations at PhonePe, one of India’s largest digital payment platforms.

Zango’s solution is already being adopted by established banks including Portugal’s Novobanco, the country’s fourth-largest bank with 1.5 million clients and €43.8 billion in assets. Novobanco’s Head of Regulatory Affairs, Lara Reis, praised the platform for dramatically reducing manual compliance work by hundreds of hours, enabling the team to focus on more strategic initiatives. FinTech challengers such as Monzo and Juni in the UK and EU have also started to integrate Zango’s compliance tools. Juni’s Head of Compliance, Sabina Ausfelt, described the platform’s horizon scanning capabilities as a potential game-changer in enhancing regulatory oversight within regulated industries.

The global financial regulatory environment encompasses tens of thousands of pages of requirements, creating costly, slow, and error-prone compliance workflows. Zango’s cloud-native platform aims to transform this complexity into actionable, easily digestible insights. For instance, the time taken to handle a regulatory workflow involving a bank and regulator was reduced from 48 hours to under 4 hours using Zango’s AI agents.

The recent seed funding round included participation from several notable investors and industry figures such as South Park Commons, Richard Davies (CEO of Allica Bank), Alan Morgan (ex-Head of Financial Services at McKinsey EMEA), Mark Ransford, Notion Capital, No Label Ventures, and Start Ventures. Anand Datta, Partner at Nexus Venture Partners, highlighted the founders’ unique combination of AI expertise and compliance domain knowledge and expressed enthusiasm for how Zango is already improving operational efficiency in global financial institutions.

The company now plans to grow its teams in key locations and build out more comprehensive modules across the GRC spectrum, positioning itself as a pioneering force in AI-driven regulatory solutions tailored to the evolving needs of financial services worldwide.

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Source: Noah Wire Services