- Certo, based in Paris, has raised $4 million in seed funding led by Daphni
- The platform handles the full product compliance process, from ingredient checks and formula validation to claims verification, labelling, and market entry
- Certo aims to reach $500,000 in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2025 and $2 million by 2027
Certo, an AI startup headquartered in Paris, has secured $4 million in seed funding led by Daphni, with support from Entrepreneurs First, Motier Ventures, and Transpose Platform.
The company, founded by Bastien Deliège-Coste and Jean Duquenne, is developing a compliance system to help consumer packaged goods companies handle the increasing complexity of international regulations.
Consumer goods companies selling internationally face regulations in up to 150 countries, each with its own rules for ingredients, formulas, marketing claims, labelling, and packaging, as the startup claims. Still, most regulatory teams use manual cross-checks, scattered spreadsheets, and disconnected document systems.
“A lot of very smart people are doing annual and repetitive work. We built Certo because we saw firsthand that regulatory teams were buried under growing requirements with no tools designed for their actual workflows,” Deliège-Coste tells Tech Funding News.
Certo’s platform covers the full compliance process with five modules: raw material and ingredient approval, formula compliance, claims verification, artwork and labelling checks, and market entry documentation. Each agent is built for a specific compliance task, instead of using general-purpose models on regulatory text.
“A lot of our competitors are relying on OpenAI or Anthropic models, so they cannot audit the database. The traceability of every finding on the platform is what makes it usable in a regulated environment,” Deliège-Coste says.
There are several AI-based compliance tools available, but Certo believes it stands out for three main reasons that are harder to copy than the technology itself. These are its database, in-house regulatory expertise, and its enterprise-focused approach, which customises workflows for each client rather than offering a self-serve tool. Deliège-Coste sees managed services as the future of the industry.
Certo’s six-person team includes members from France, Switzerland, and the US, with one woman currently on the team. Deliège-Coste points out that regulatory affairs in personal care and home care are mostly female across the industry, so he expects the team’s makeup to change as they hire more regulatory experts.
“Every consumer product sold internationally goes through a compliance process that hasn’t changed in twenty years: manual checks, scattered PDFs, expensive consultants. Whether it’s cosmetics, food, or dietary supplements, the pain is the same. Certo replaces that with AI agents that actually verify products against live regulations, with auditable reasoning across every ingredient and every geography,” say Briac Lescure and Jonas Simonin, partners, daphni.
The company plans to use the $4 million for three main goals: hiring regulatory experts to grow its database and managed services, speeding up commercial growth in the US, where it already has customers and sees the biggest opportunity, and expanding beyond personal care and food supplements into food and beverage, where product development is underway.
Certo has not shared customer names or current ARR, but it has set internal goals of $500,000 in ARR by the end of 2025 and $2 million by 2027.
