Nav Garcha

Nav Garcha is the co-founder and CTO of Karavel, the London-based AI compliance platform he built alongside Pedro Sousa to automate regulatory monitoring, advertising reviews, and approval workflows for highly regulated industries. A software engineer of British Indian heritage, Garcha studied Computer Science with a Year in Industry at the University of Kent before developing his career across some of the UK’s most technically demanding consumer technology companies.

Garcha’s professional journey included engineering roles at Channel 4, Revolut, Deliveroo, CNN, and ClearScore — giving him direct experience building software at scale across media, fintech, and financial services. This cross-sector perspective proved formative: working inside regulated businesses, he experienced firsthand the operational fragmentation and manual overhead that compliance teams face when monitoring regulatory change, reviewing marketing materials, and coordinating approval decisions across teams. When he met Sousa — who had spent over a decade working as a Head of Compliance — the two discovered a shared diagnosis of the problem and complementary skills to build a solution.

At Karavel, Garcha leads the engineering and AI architecture that underpins the platform’s core capabilities: an AdCheck tool that enables financial promotion reviews to be completed three times faster with a 91% first-pass approval rate, and a horizon scanning system that delivers daily automated regulatory alerts across financial services, insurance, healthcare, and consumer credit. The platform replaces the bi-weekly manual briefings and spreadsheet-driven workflows that compliance professionals have relied on for decades.

Karavel raised £1.25 million in pre-seed funding in January 2026, led by Fuel Ventures. Early customers include ClearScore, Credit Karma, and Shawbrook. Garcha has been recognised by colleagues as an exceptional engineering talent whose technical rigour is matched by a clear commercial understanding of what compliance teams actually need to do their jobs.