There’s a quiet war happening inside every financial institution. Compliance teams are armed with spreadsheets, red pens, and a prayer, trying to decode 50,000-page regulatory tomes that read like a legal hangover. While most startups chased shiny objects in KYC and AML, two founders saw the real monster hiding in plain sight, and built something bold enough to tame it.
Enter Zango AI, a regulatory compliance platform that doesn’t just automate the noise, it interprets it. Think of it as a team of sleepless, regulation-specific LLMs embedded with decades of financial services know-how, built to handle the brutal complexity that slows down even the most advanced banks. This week, Zango AI officially stepped out of stealth mode with a $4.8M seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners. And if you’re reading this thinking “RegTech isn’t sexy,” you haven’t met what Ritesh Singhania and Shashank Agarwal are cooking out of London, San Francisco, and Bengaluru.
Now let’s talk about why this matters. Compliance isn’t just a cost center, it’s the air financial institutions breathe, the oxygen that keeps licenses intact and reputations clean. Zango’s approach is first-principles and AI native, not a patch job. Their platform runs real-time gap analyses, performs automated control testing, and executes audit prep like a machine with a law degree and no sleep schedule. And yeah, it works. They shaved a 48-hour regulatory process down to under 4 for one major banking client. That’s not incremental. That’s a body blow to the status quo.
But this isn’t just a tech flex. Look at the clients, Novobanco, Portugal’s fourth-largest bank. Monzo, with over 12 million users in the UK. Juni, the European fintech backed by €280M+ in funding. These aren’t early-stage pilots, they’re battle-tested deployments. When Lara Reis from Novobanco calls Zango a “game-changer” and Sabina Ausfelt from Juni says it’s “revolutionizing the second line of defense,” you take note.
And then there’s the investor bench. Anand Datta from Nexus isn’t throwing darts, he’s a newly-minted Partner who’s been backing vision before it hits the Gartner chart. Richard Davies, CEO of Allica Bank. Alan Morgan, former head of McKinsey’s financial services group. Mark Ransford, fintech investor and senior advisor at CVC. South Park Commons was in from day zero. This isn’t hype, it’s conviction.
Zango AI isn’t scaling a feature. It’s building an industry standard. Financial compliance is a $97.6B market by 2035, and the AI-native slice is growing at nearly 37% annually. You think this round was about survival? Nah. This is fuel for expansion, into insurance, asset management, and anywhere regulation breathes down necks.
Singhania and Agarwal didn’t chase the easy problems. They built Zango to eat the hard ones. And now it’s hungry.
