Condukt Raises £7.5m to Replace Periodic KYB Checks with Always-On Agentic Compliance

Condukt, the next-generation compliance platform for financial services, has raised £7.5 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and MMC Ventures, with additional participation from Cocoa Ventures. Founded in May 2023 and operating in stealth until this announcement, the company has spent two years quietly building the infrastructure and client base to support a new category it calls 'perpetual KYB'. The funding will be used to deepen institutional partnerships, accelerate go-to-market activities, and grow its engineering team across London and Porto.

Financial crime compliance is one of the most expensive operational burdens in financial services. A recent Forrester report estimated that businesses globally spend $206 billion annually to meet financial crime compliance standards, with 98% of institutions reporting rising costs and labour consistently identified as the largest single driver of additional spend. At the same time, 2025 saw record AML penalties worldwide, with regulators issuing more than $6 billion in fines by mid-year alone — creating mounting urgency to modernise compliance operations beyond checkbox-style periodic reviews.

Condukt's platform introduces a proprietary real-time data layer that continuously synchronises with client operations, replacing the traditional model of point-in-time KYB checks — conducted at onboarding or on a 12-month review cycle — with always-on, agentic monitoring. When a registered business changes ownership, adds a director, modifies its activities, or triggers a risk signal in public data sources, Condukt's AI agents detect and flag it automatically. This removes the manual triage burden from compliance teams and ensures regulated businesses stay current without slowing down onboarding or operations. The company already counts Wise, Tide, Mollie, Rakuten, Shift4, Flatpay and myPOS among its customers.

The platform was built by co-founders Paulo Guichard and Bhasker Rao, who met at Revolut Business after senior roles at SumUp and Square (now Block) respectively. The company's engineering team draws from former Revolut and Meta talent — a combination that positions Condukt to operate at scale across both data infrastructure and AI systems. Lightspeed partner Alex Schmitt described the company as having achieved the commercial maturity and client base to lead a new category, while MMC's Ollie Richards noted that the compliance market has reached an inflection point where the convergence of AI capability and regulatory pressure makes incumbent approaches increasingly untenable.

The broader backdrop is a regulatory environment that is actively moving toward continuous monitoring requirements. As the cost of manual compliance spirals and enforcement intensity climbs, the value proposition for automation shifts from nice-to-have to strategic necessity. Condukt's architecture — live data, AI agents, and perpetual oversight — is designed to be the infrastructure layer that lets financial institutions meet that bar without adding headcount. With its first institutional round now closed, the company is well-positioned to expand its footprint across European fintech and into the major banking institutions it is already in conversation with.

Sources

• Soapbox VC – Condukt lands £7.5m in funding
• Tech.eu – Condukt emerges from stealth with $10M
• Lightspeed Venture Partners – Building the Data Foundation for Agentic Compliance
• Fintech Global – Condukt raises $10m to power perpetual KYB automation