How spektr is Building the Compliance Infrastructure Layer for the AI Era

Recently, we were thrilled to announce our Series A lead investment in spektr. If you haven’t already seen Mikkel Skarnager, spektr’s CEO and co-founder, fending off sharks while standing on a paddleboard off the coast of Denmark to announce the round, watch that first. What follows is our investment thesis for spektr — a concise summary of why we have so much conviction in what we believe will become a category-defining company.

The Problem: Compliance Work is Still Manual Work

The compliance industry has spent decades building point solutions: separate tools for KYC (Know Your Customer), KYB (Know Your Business), ODD (Ongoing Due Diligence), transaction monitoring, case management, and the long tail of daily tasks. Each platform solves a narrow problem but creates new integration headaches, producing a tech stack that grows more expensive and complex every year. Despite the launch of so many tools, the day-to-day work of compliance analysts has barely changed since the turn of the century. Most platforms store data and route tasks, but they fall short when it comes to understanding, interpreting, and most importantly, making decisions. Compliance analysts still spend hours manually pulling data from disconnected systems, reviewing documents, mapping ownership structures, and writing risk rationales one case at a time.

Against this backdrop of proliferating point solutions, the economics of compliance continue to worsen even as the work itself remains extremely manual. BCG conducted a 2025 global benchmarking exercise which revealed that large financial institutions allocate 1.7% of total operating costs to compliance (encompassing IT infrastructure, legal fees, and external advisors), with 2.9% of FTEs working in compliance functions. McKinsey estimates that regtech (across monitoring, reporting, and compliance) generated $26B in revenue in 2023 and is expected to grow up to 14% annually through 2028, yet that spend has not translated into meaningful operational relief for compliance teams. At the same time, regulatory pressure is intensifying: McKinsey reported that banks paid a record-breaking $19.3B in penalties in 2024 alone, driven in part by sweeping new requirements such as the EU Anti-Money Laundering Package, EBA guidelines on restrictive measures, and the EU AI Act.

The underlying problem is structural. The legacy platforms that power compliance operations today — built long before the AI era — are stitched together with brittle point-to-point integrations, often require months of costly professional services to implement even simple workflow changes, and fundamentally cannot support automation at scale. As a result, financial institutions are forced to choose between unaffordable rip-and-replace projects, expensive in-house builds, or an ever-expanding patchwork of point solutions that compound operational complexity instead of reducing it. As one General Counsel at a major US fintech shared with us, “We use Persona for KYC, Middesk for KYB, some aspects of both for OFAC, and the entire process is a hodge-podge that gives me heartburn.” This is why, even after decades of investment into compliance tech purchases, compliance analysts are still the ones pulling data from fragmented systems, reconciling inconsistent records, and making judgment calls case-by-case.

Enter spektr: The Control Plane for Compliance Operations

spektr is building the foundational infrastructure layer for compliance automation: an AI‑native orchestration platform that sits atop a financial institution’s existing systems and deploys specialized AI agents to automate much of the work analysts currently do by hand. Rather than ripping and replacing the compliance stack outright, spektr becomes the connective tissue — the orchestration and intelligence layer that turns fragmented, manual workflows into automated compliance operations running at scale.

spektr has two tightly coupled layers: (1) the Process Engine (orchestration layer), which models and runs onboarding, monitoring, risk assessment, remediation, and event‑driven workflows across internal systems and external vendors and (2) the spektrAl Engine (AI agent layer), which deploys hyper‑specific AI agents that can be composed into custom compliance flows via a natural‑language Agent Builder.

A compliance team can prompt spektr in plain language (“build an SME onboarding flow for France with ODD triggers on industry changes”) and in minutes they can receive a fully-generated process complete with agent assignments and human review steps, a workflow that traditional vendors would have taken months of professional services work to deliver.

The ROI is tangible and immediate. One unicorn customer reduced ODD handling time from 40 minutes to 6 minutes per case, cut cost per case from €21 to €2.25, and lowered onboarding loss from 25% to below 10% after deploying spektr, outcomes that the incremental optimization of legacy platforms has never been able to deliver.

The Team: A Refined Taste for Compliance

In 2002, Paul Graham published an essay in which he used the word “taste” to describe the competitive edge that separates great founders from the rest. In the age of coding agents, where product functionality is increasingly democratized, taste as Paul Graham articulated it has never mattered more. When we met CEO Mikkel Skarnager, CTO Ciprian Florescu, CRO Jan‑Erik Aabo Wagner, and CPO Jeremy Joly, the co‑founders of spektr, it became abundantly clear that they have a refined taste for compliance. This is a founding team that has spent the better part of a decade in exactly this category. Mikkel and Ciprian previously co‑founded HelloFlow, a no‑code KYC/KYB onboarding orchestration platform they built and sold to Canadian unicorn Trulioo. They know the buyers, the competitive landscape, and most importantly, the users they are building for at a level of depth that is extremely hard to replicate. They have seen where legacy platforms break, where in‑house builds stall, and how to design infrastructure that can actually become the system-of-record for compliance.

That taste shows up in the room with Mikkel and team. When spektr pitched a major UK private equity firm with tens of billions under management, they ran the entire 90‑minute meeting as a live product session with Q&A instead of a slide deck, and they walked out having clearly outperformed every other vendor in the process. spektr has earned the right to show rather than tell.

The spektr team is scrappy in the best way. Three of the four co‑founders are over 6' 4", yet when they set up their first Copenhagen office, they chose a space where half of the floor requires ducking —  in Denmark low ceilings means cheaper rent and cheaper rent means more cash to spend on building product and serving customers. (PSA for all prospective hires, spektr just moved into a new office with high ceilings throughout). They are also upfront in ways that matter. As we initiated our diligence process, the co-founders flagged a discoverable Tegus transcript that appeared to be a strong customer reference but was not from an actual spektr customer. Their transparency was a small but meaningful signal.

What Customers Are Saying

Customers of spektr include Santander Leasing, Pleo, Mercuryo, Monta, and Phantom, among others. During diligence, we spent considerable time speaking directly with spektr’s customers and prospects, and the pattern of feedback was exceptional, especially for an early-stage company. Customers consistently highlighted spektr’s flexibility and vendor neutrality, measurable ROI and efficiency gains, API quality and developer experience, intuitive no‑code workflow builder, white‑label UI customization, and regulatory change automation. They also emphasized spektr’s differentiated customer support and responsiveness, and described Mikkel as tenacious, strategic, prepared, collaborative, and well‑networked.

Some select soundbites from our conversation include:

• “Mikkel is great. I have spoken to a lot of founders in this space and I like him most. Good depth, tons of specific knowledge about the problem space. I like the modularity of the product, building blocks with specific skills that can be combined to create different processes.”

• “Mikkel is extraordinary, moves fast, and knows the space super well…Mikkel loves speed. He pushes things fast. He also enjoys competent feedback. He takes that in.”

• “The number one thing I talk about is how flexible [spektr] is… We can opt in and out of using their partners versus our own processes.”

• “We looked at their APIs, our CTO looked at the APIs and said, ‘Okay, how flexible is this? Can we actually build on top of these APIs?’ The answer was yes… Their API documentation was super well-documented and quite flexible.”

Every discussion converged on a single theme: spektr’s founding team understands compliance from 360 degrees. The team has an insider perspective of what compliance entails through the eyes of front-line analysts, product and operations leads, chief compliance officers, and procurement teams, and that deeply earned context over many years of real-world experience is the bedrock of their competitive moat.

The Unbounded Upside Case

With each new investment we make at NEA, we describe the unbounded upside case — the opportunity for a company to become a category-defining business and a fund returner. We believe spektr fits squarely into this profile.

To dig into our analysis, start with a simple observation: every person and every business in the world wants to know who they are doing business with. In regulated markets, this is not discretionary; it is a legal mandate that already translates to tens of billions in annual revenue. But the process of executing KYC, KYB, and ODD is still deeply broken because the workflows are tediously complex and the underlying data lives across thousands of disparate registries, jurisdictions, and vendor databases. That is why the market has historically fragmented into point solutions.

From our perspective, AI has the power to fundamentally change this equation, to bring the data together and collapse disparate workflows into a single, automated system-of-record. The company that successfully executes on this vision will become the infrastructure layer for how the entire compliance industry operates. When we think about TAM, we anchor it to total compliance opex spend, not just software licenses. A historical analogy is instructive: the winners of prior enterprise infrastructure replacement cycles (including Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow) achieved winner-take -most dynamics by becoming the system of record. spektr is executing on precisely this playbook.

We believe that spektr is one of the best-positioned companies to capture the AI compliance opportunity, and we could not be more excited to back Mikkel, Ciprian, Erik, Jeremy, and the entire spektr team as they build the defining compliance infrastructure platform for the AI era.

Learn more at https://www.spektr.com/ and explore open roles at spektr at https://www.spektr.com/careers.