Regulatory compliance startup Zango has raised $4.8m, in a seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from South Park Commons - company’s first backer where Zango was incubated, Richard Davies, CEO of Allica Bank, Alan Morgan, Senior Partner Financial Services at McKinsey (EMEA) and Chairman Adfisco, Mark Ransford, Notion Capital, No Label Ventures and Start Ventures.
The funds raised will be used to expand teams in London & Bengaluru along with building out the other product modules for an AI-native Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC). Zango will expand into other verticals of financial services as well outside of banking to insurance and asset management
Traditional SaaS stops at KYC and AML, leaving the rest of compliance buried in spreadsheets and manual reviews. Zango changes that with their regulation-aware AI agents that continuously track regulatory updates (horizon scanning), identify compliance gaps in real time, and keep firms audit-ready — no operational drag, no surprises.
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.
Today, financial services regulations stretch across tens of thousands of pages, creating slow, manual workflows and significant costs for businesses striving to stay compliant. Zango addresses this critical challenge by transforming regulatory complexity into a clear list of requirements. Its innovative 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’s AI agents don’t just read and interpret regulations with a high degree of accuracy — they integrate into a company’s day-to-day operations. In one example, a workflow with one of the banks involving the regulator was reduced from 48 hours to under 4 hours, showcasing the power of AI in regulated environments. Compliance becomes a continuous, always-on process rather than a one-time checklist. Traditional consultants give you a green light at a moment in time. But fast-growing businesses change quickly. Six months later, that “green light” is irrelevant — and by the time a regulator shows up, you could be out of bounds.
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"We don’t sell a platform — we sell a solution," said Ritesh Singhania, Co-founder of Zango. "Our AI agents are paired with humans-in-the-loop to ensure 100% accuracy. Peace of mind doesn’t come from a tool; it comes from a result. That’s why we win against consultants — because they don’t just sell software, and neither do we.”
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.
"The global regulatory landscape is ripe for disruption," said 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."
"We are thrilled with how Zango AI has transformed our regulatory screening processes, saving us hundreds of hours of manual repetitive work and allowing our team to focus on strategic initiatives," said Lara Reis, Head of regulatory affairs, Novobanco.
"For Horizon scanning, Zango is a game-changer. The platform’s current and future modules are set to revolutionize the second line of defense work in regulated industries like ours," Sabina Ausfelt, Head of compliance, Juni.
