- Kalipso, based in Barcelona, has raised $3.2M to help financial institutions across Europe automate regulatory compliance. The company covers over 40 jurisdictions and handles more than 3,000 regulatory updates each day.
- Varsity, a seed fund co-founded by Didier Valet, former deputy CEO of Société Générale, led the round. Valet points out that compliance at Europe’s largest banks remains largely manual, fragmented, and reactive.
- Kalipso was started by CEO Pierre Ferran, who brought together legal and software engineering experience from Klarna, and COO Virginia Debernardi, who led legal operations at Productsup.
Didier Valet was deputy CEO of Société Générale, where he led corporate and investment banking for one of France’s top financial groups. After leaving in 2018, he became a leading angel investor in Europe, supporting fintech companies like Pennylane and Qonto. He also co-founded Varsity, a Paris-based seed fund aiming for €150M.
Now, he is backing Kalipso, a regulatory technology company founded in 2025 in Barcelona that raised $3.2M to help regulated organisations manage regulatory changes. Other investors in the round include Lanai, Plug and Play, Kima Ventures, and Vento.
“I spent most of my career inside one of Europe’s largest banks, where compliance is still largely manual, fragmented and reactive. What convinced me about Kalipso is the team — founders who genuinely understand both the law and the engineering, building for a sector I know from the inside. This is infrastructure the industry will need,” Valet says.
Built by people with industry experience
Most regulatory technology tools are made either by lawyers who know the rules but lack technical skills or by engineers who don’t have compliance experience. Kalipso’s founders have knowledge in both fields.
Pierre Ferran, the chief executive, holds a law degree and an LL.M. from Stanford and is also a software engineer, a rare combination central to the company’s value proposition. He previously held senior legal roles at Klarna and Philips while also writing code. Virginia Debernardi, co-founder and chief operating officer, served as general counsel at Productsup before joining Kalipso.
“The hardest part of compliance is not interpreting the law. It’s implementing it — and almost nobody building in this space has stood on both sides of it. I have. As a lawyer embedded in engineering at Klarna, I watched those handoffs fail in real time. Most tools on the market are built either by lawyers who can’t engineer or engineers who don’t understand the law. Kalipso is built by people who are both. We didn’t abstract this problem — we lived it, and we built the system we couldn’t buy,” Ferran says.
Kalipso brings the entire regulatory process into a single system. When new rules come out, Kalipso identifies the relevant obligations for each organisation, matches them to current policies, highlights any gaps, and creates ready-to-use solutions, all with clear links to the original rules. It also assigns responsibility and includes audit tools.
The platform tracks over 100 regulatory sources in more than 40 countries and handles over 3,000 updates every day. Its Regulatory Radar feature uses AI to show each client the most important changes for their business and location.
“Compliance teams have been stitching together disconnected tools for too long. Kalipso closes that gap, taking organisations from regulatory change to the implementation of policies, controls and procedures within a single system. Teams don’t need another alert feed or another long report. They need infrastructure that turns regulation into action, and the peace of mind of knowing they are compliant,” Debernardi adds.
A consolidating market and a clear opportunity
The market is changing quickly, with more companies joining together as the industry matures. CUBE, a UK company that provides automated regulatory intelligence, got support from Hg in March 2024 and has since bought Thomson Reuters’ Regulatory Intelligence business, Acin, Kodex AI, and 4CRisk. Corlytics, started in Dublin in 2013, bought Clausematch in 2023 to move from just monitoring regulations to managing policies.
Kalipso stands out as a platform for in-house legal and compliance teams. It helps them move from regulatory changes to implementing controls, all within a single system, rather than relying on alert feeds or lengthy reports. The platform supports key frameworks like DORA, MiCAR, PSD2, the AI Act, GDPR, and MiFID II. It is ISO 27001-certified and stores all data on European cloud servers, meeting the EU’s growing data localisation requirements.
Early customers include Groupe Caisse des Dépôts in France and Alma. Kalipso plans to hire more people in 2026 and wants to grow in the UK, France, Spain, Italy, and the Benelux region. So far, the company has raised $3.2M, but the type of funding round was not specified.
Market trends are in Kalipso’s favour. The global RegTech sector was worth $24.3 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow to $112.1 billion by 2033, with an annual growth rate of 21.1%. In Europe, regulatory changes are happening faster than most in-house teams can keep up with, as the European Commission pushes new rules such as DORA, MiCAR, the AI Act, and updates to PSD2 and MiFID II.
A key question is whether $3.2M provides enough runway to secure enterprise compliance clients, who are traditionally slow to adopt new solutions, before larger incumbents further consolidate the market.
However, this funding round benefits from strong validation. A former deputy CEO of Société Générale, with nearly two decades of direct experience, has publicly stated that the necessary infrastructure is still lacking.
