We are excited to announce our investment in Condukt. Together with MMC Ventures, we are investing in a $10 million seed round to build the next-generation compliance infrastructure for financial services.
Compliance is poised for a breakthrough
At Lightspeed, we believe AI’s most profound impact will come from transforming tedious, repetitive work, particularly in the operational back office. Starting with one of the largest, most complex operational challenges: compliance.
Despite years of investment in workflow tools and data systems, compliance costs continue to spiral. Financial institutions now spend $ 206 billion annually on compliance globally. And despite compliance officers’ best efforts to digitize their functions, labor remains the single largest cost driver. The problem isn’t a lack of technology – it’s that existing solutions haven’t addressed the fundamental issue: data quality.
Building the data foundation
Data quality is the foundation of any automation strategy, especially in compliance. In Europe’s highly fragmented regulatory landscape, building this foundation is impossible for any single institution to solve alone. This is what Paulo Guichard and Bhasker Rao learned over two decades across scaled financial institutions, like AmEx and neo-finance organizations like Block, SumUp, and Revolut.
Without harmonizing the scattered data access and structure, automation will never achieve its potential.
Condukt’s core thesis is simple: building direct-to-register access that delivers current, accurate, and traceable data with the ability to back-track it to the original filing. This proprietary data infrastructure serves as the foundation for truly automated compliance, enabling AI agents to work with reliable information rather than outdated snapshots.
From point-in-time to perpetual compliance
The most forward-thinking organizations are using Condukt to fundamentally reimagine their risk. Instead of point-in-time checks – KYB at onboarding or periodic reviews every 12 months – Condukt enables perpetual, always-on oversight. By combining real-time data with agentic AI, compliance teams can monitor their entire active customer base continuously, catching risk as it emerges rather than discovering it months after the fact.
Condukt has evolved beyond being only a data layer. It’s becoming a comprehensive compliance platform that brings together specialized AI agents and agentic checks. Using real-time proprietary and open-source data, it automates the process of onboarding, verification, and ongoing monitoring.
Out of stealth with an impressive set of logos
In compliance, getting it right matters more than moving fast. While the AI ecosystem grew increasingly noisy, Paulo and Baz stayed heads down, building their foundation properly. Today, Condukt emerges from stealth already powering compliance for some of Europe’s most demanding fintechs: Wise, Tide, Mollie, Shift4, Rakuten, Flatpay, and myPOS.
Paulo and Bhasker’s deep domain expertise make them the obvious first call for financial institutions building the foundational layer for agentic risk management. But expertise alone doesn’t build category-defining companies – teams do. Condukt has assembled a world-class engineering team across London and Portugal, drawing talent from the likes of Meta and Revolut, to build the always-on nervous system that modern compliance demands. You can join them on their journey here.
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