London-based Zango, a company specialising in regulatory compliance solutions, emerges from stealth and announces that it has raised $4.8M (approximately €4M) in a round led by Nexus Venture Partners.
Nexus Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm partnering with extraordinary entrepreneurs building product-first companies. With $2.6B under management, Nexus operates as a unified team across the US and India.
“The global regulatory landscape is ripe for disruption,” says Anand Datta, Partner at Nexus Venture Partners. “Ritesh and Shashank, with their firsthand, proven expertise, developed Zango’s first-principles approach: uniquely marrying cutting-edge AI with human compliance expertise. Their AI-led solution is already augmenting the compliance team and increasing their efficiency at global financial institutions. We’re incredibly excited to be part of their journey.”
Other participants in the latest round include South Park Commons, Richard Davies, CEO of Allica Bank, Alan Morgan, former head of Financial Services at McKinsey (EMEA), Mark Ransford, Notion Capital, No Label Ventures, and Start Ventures.
Fund utilisation
The UK company will use the funds to expand teams in London & Bengaluru, along with building out the other product modules for an AI-native GRC.
Additionally, Zango will use the capital to expand into other verticals of financial services, as well as outside of banking, to insurance and asset management.
Who are the founders?
Zango was co-founded by Ritesh Singhania and Shashank Agarwal, both second-time founders with deep experience in regulatory technology.
Ritesh previously founded ClearGlass, a pension compliance platform, and served as Head of Technology at Simplitium (acquired by NASDAQ).
Shashank co-founded Third Watch, an AI-powered fraud detection startup (acquired by Razorpay, valued at $7.5bn+), and led trust and compliance engineering at PhonePe, which is gearing up for India’s largest IPO.
To learn more about Zango’s mission, challenges, AI compliance, and more, we at Silicon Canals interviewed Ritesh Singhania as part of our “New Kid on the Block” series.
Here’s what he has to say.
Frustration with traditional compliance sparked Zango’s birth
Currently, financial services regulations cover thousands of pages, leading to slow processes and high costs for businesses trying to stay compliant.
Additionally, traditional SaaS never cracked compliance since the software couldn’t actually read or interpret regulations.
“As a result, automation stayed limited — mostly KYC and AML — while expensive consultants delivered the real work. But consultants are a point-in-time fix, not 24/7,” explains Singhania. “I saw this firsthand while building a compliance startup in asset management. The question became: With AI, could we interpret regulations and deliver always-on compliance agents?”
It’s all about eliminating complexity
At its core, Zango’s mission is simple — to eliminate complexity.
Singhania puts it plainly: “We make regulatory complexity invisible so our customers can focus on building what’s next. With Zango, compliance is as simple as asking Google: ‘I want to launch a lending product in [X] market — what do I need to do?’”
Zango addresses this critical challenge by transforming regulatory complexity into a clear list of requirements.
Its solution is training regulation-specific Large Language Models (LLMs) to make compliance as intuitive as a simple query, enabling businesses to launch new products and expand into new markets with unprecedented speed and confidence, helping compliance be a growth centre rather than just a cost centre.
Zango simplified
Zango is a regulatory compliance solution that leverages AI alongside trusted subject-matter experts to automate horizon scanning, gap analysis, and controls testing for global financial institutions.
“Zango trains AI agents to read and interpret complex regulations. So, a financial organisation instantly knows what they need to do — step by step — to launch products or enter new markets, staying compliant the whole way,” Singhania breaks it down.
The big challenges
“In compliance, 99 per cent accuracy isn’t enough — and you can’t reach 100% with current models alone,” Singhania explains.
To bridge this gap, Zango designed a system where human experts work alongside the AI, vetting its interpretations and refining its outputs.
“In compliance, you’re not selling just a platform — you’re delivering an outcome. It’s always tech plus experts. This also gives us an edge over the big foundational models, who’d never touch this vertical,” he adds.
Additionally, Zango plans to expand its operations into insurance and asset management. However, it’s going to be another challenge, believes Singhania.
“These legacy industries are more hesitant to adopt new tech. So, building trust will be the hardest challenge. But our track record with high-street banks in the EU should help open doors,” he reveals.
Staying accurate beyond the UK
When dealing with regulations across the globe, accuracy and fairness are crucial.
The UK company addresses this by combining AI with hands-on expertise.
“Every country has its own rules and interpretations — so we combine AI with real experts. Our compliance team constantly trains the AI, checks its answers, and updates it for local differences. Human review keeps us accurate and trustworthy, no matter where our clients operate,” he adds.
Singhania also highlights that interpreting regulation varies by region.
“Interpreting regulation in the UK (common law) is different from the EU (case law). These nuances are the IP we’re building — and they’re key to our accuracy,” he adds.
Freeing up compliance teams’ burden
Zango’s goal is to help compliance teams focus on what really matters.
“Growth teams — product and marketing — are often blocked by compliance every time they launch a new product, market, or campaign. With our AI agents handling 80% of the routine checks, teams only go to compliance for the 20% that really needs their attention,” he explains.
As a result, this frees up compliance teams to work on strategic initiatives and unblocks growth teams to move faster.
Staying ahead
Explaining Zango staying ahead in the AI compliance market, Singhania says, “Most compliance startups struggle to grow past $5–10M in revenue because they focus on the long tail of fintechs — early adopters, but they don’t pay for compliance. The truth is, it’s the large, established financial institutions that do.”
“We’ve already broken into tier-one regional banks and insurance firms in Europe — it would take any other startup 3–5 years to get there. From here, it’s an execution game: who can move fastest and win the surface area.”
Zango is actively used by established banks such as Novobanco, the fourth-largest bank in Portugal, and is gaining traction with leading neo banks in the EU and UK, including Monzo and Juni.
What does success look like for Zango in five years?
Looking five years ahead, Zango has its sights set high. The founder envisions a future where regulators themselves rely on AI to draft policies, and the company is at the centre of that.
“Five years from now, regulators won’t be drafting policy documents from scratch — they’ll use prompts to generate them. For us, real success is when regulators trust Zango’s AI agents to write those policies. If they trust our tech, everyone else will too,” he says.
“I was talking to the CEO of a big fintech who told me they once lost a tier-one bank deal because the bank thought the regulator favoured their competitor. That says it all: if the regulator trusts you, you win. That’s the level of trust we’re building,” concludes Singhania.
