AI agents in financial services boost productivity by handling thousands of customer interactions daily, but manual compliance reviews cannot scale with rising regulatory scrutiny. Alinia, a startup building compliance tools for AI systems, addresses this by embedding real-time auditing, guardrails, and risk controls into AI workflows, ensuring compliance across markets via tools like multilingual Guard models.
Ariadna Font Llitjós, co-founder & CEO of Alinia, says, “As global spending on generative AI approaches $644 billion by 2025 (Gartner), adoption in regulated industries is hitting the compliance wall. Alinia is building the safe gateway that gives compliance and business teams centralised visibility and control across the enterprise.”
Today, this New York and Barcelona-based startup raised $7.5M in seed funding, led by Mouro Capital, with participation from Raise Ventures, Speedinvest and Precursor Ventures.
Building compliance backbone for high-stakes AI agents
Founded by Ariadna Font Llitjós and Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis, who previously worked for Twitter, IBM, Hugging Face, and Sony AI, Alinia is building the infrastructure that enables organisations to audit and govern their AI systems at scale.
Ariadna tells TFN, “When we started Alinia, the market for controlling and constraining genAI applications was mostly an idea that people agreed they would have to worry about at some point in the future. The EU AI Act was still being drafted and we knew we were a bit early, but we also knew it was coming, and faster than most people realized. Before trying to raise our first round of funding, we spent a lot of time talking to over 100 companies to understand how they were thinking about AI and how they were already using it. We did our own direct market research, not just read reports about it.”
Alinia’s Guardrails API delivers real-time enforcement with Investment Guard for MiFID2 compliance and Hallucination Detector, tunable to risk thresholds and multilingual. USPs include precision for jurisdiction-specific violations like EU Delegated Regulation 2017/565, unlike generic guardrails, plus upcoming Compliance Controllers for custom regulations.
Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis, Co-founder & COO, adds, “Generic guardrails miss nuanced violations tied to business realities in specific jurisdictions. Detecting and constraining specific types of AI output, such as investment advice under EU Delegated Regulation 2017/565 & ESMA Guidelines, requires precision and contextual understanding. ”
Competitors like Compliance.ai (regulatory monitoring), Theta Lake (communication compliance), and Napier AI (general AI compliance) lack Alinia’s focus on real-time AI agent outputs in finance.
Alinia is working with Santander Group, where it will support the bank’s AI governance framework. It is also used by Origin Financial, whose AI financial advisor relies on Alinia for back-end controls.
What about diversity? And how is it being female in tech?
Ariadna notes, “38,5% of the team is formed by women, most of them technical team members.”
On being female in tech, she adds, “For me, after a long career in AI research and tech, this was a logical next step.
For women entering the AI or technical field, I would say we need you. We need diverse experiences and voices in tech and especially in AI. Gender is one of the many sources of diversity, though. Age, personal and professional experiences, place of origin, languages are some others.
For women considering whether to be founders, I would say: “you’re not getting any younger”, so if you have the ambition, the energy and are able to do without pay for a few months, do it! Surround yourself with a great team and seasoned advisors. You are guaranteed to learn tons, and as long as you remember to enjoy the journey, it will be well worth it.” “But make sure you are ready to suffer and go through tough and very tough times. Make sure you are ok if at the end, you are only left with the learnings. Statistically, that is the most likely outcome.”
Clearly, the world needs more women in tech and more women founders. So my recommendation is that if they have the ambition, work to overcome the fear. One thing that helped me make the call was thinking of all the young men that become founders with far less experience than me and many women.”
What’s next?
Alinia is scaling its AI engineering, research, sales and customer success teams across Europe and the US to meet accelerating enterprise demand. Ariadna concludes, “We want Alinia to become the compliance infrastructure of AI Agents. The next three years are going to be key for us to keep developing our proprietary compliance models and deploy the technology at massive scale under human experts control.”
Manuel Silva Martínez, General Partner of Mouro Capital, says, “Innovation cannot scale without trust. AI cannot transform the financial services industry without being deployed responsibly, in an explainable and auditable way, at scale. The future of AI cannot be conceived without the contribution of the Alinia team to the maturity of the AI industry.”
Charles Hudson, GP of Precursor Ventures, “We backed Ariadna and Carlos because they’re building for the reality enterprises face today — AI is here, but trust and control are not. Alinia’s vision is both timely and essential.”
