Kalipso, a regulatory technology company based in Barcelona, wants compliance teams to stop juggling tools that only tell them what changed. Instead, the company is building one system that finishes the job. Kalipso was started by Pierre Ferran, a lawyer and software engineer who previously held legal roles at Klarna and Philips, and Virginia Debernardi, who served as General Counsel at Productsup.
Across Europe, compliance teams are struggling to keep up. Regulators keep introducing new rules, often faster than organizations can absorb them. According to IMARC Group, the global regulatory technology market was worth somewhere between $17 billion and $19 billion in 2025. It is expected to grow more than 17% a year through the early 2030s. Banks and other regulated firms in Europe have already spent heavily to comply with rules like GDPR, PSD2, and MiFID II. The European Commission's continued push for new regulation is only adding to that load.
Kalipso has now raised $3.2 million to expand into new markets and grow its team. The round was led by Varsity, with Lanai, Plug and Play, Kima Ventures, and Vento also taking part.
The problem Kalipso is trying to solve shows up at one specific moment: when a legal rule has to turn into something a company actually does. A new regulation lands. Someone has to read it, work out what it means, check it against existing policies, and find where the gaps are. Then someone has to fix those gaps, decide who owns the fix, and keep a record proving it happened. Right now, most teams do this by hand. They lean on a mix of spreadsheets and documents that don't talk to each other.
Didier Valet, a board member and investor in Kalipso, has watched this problem up close. He spent most of his career inside one of Europe's largest banks, where he saw compliance handled reactively rather than as an ongoing, structured process.
"I spent most of my career inside one of Europe's largest banks, where compliance is still largely manual, fragmented and reactive. What convinced me about Kalipso is the team — founders who genuinely understand both the law and the engineering, building for a sector I know from the inside. This is infrastructure the industry will need." — Didier Valet, Board Member and investor, former Deputy CEO of Société Générale and co-founder of Varsity
His experience points to something bigger happening across the industry. As regulatory demands pile up across different countries, more organizations are looking for tools that can keep pace, rather than relying on occasional manual checks.
With this round, Kalipso wants to grow its team substantially in 2026. It also plans to expand into the UK, France, Spain, Italy, and the Benelux region. The company says it's seeing more demand from compliance teams at larger organizations, ones juggling complicated obligations across several markets at once.
A big part of that growth will go toward the company's core platform. It already tracks more than 100 regulatory sources across more than 40 jurisdictions, and processes over 3,000 regulatory updates a day. Kalipso also plans to keep developing Regulatory Radar, a feature that follows regulations from early proposals all the way to final rules and guidance. It uses automated matching to flag which updates actually matter to a given company.
Pierre Ferran, the company's co-founder and CEO, points to his own background to explain the gap he's trying to close.
"The hardest part of compliance is not interpreting the law. It's implementing it — and almost nobody building in this space has stood on both sides of it. I have. As a lawyer embedded in engineering at Klarna, I watched those handoffs fail in real time. Most tools on the market are built either by lawyers who can't engineer or engineers who don't understand the law. Kalipso is built by people who are both. We didn't abstract this problem: we lived it, and we built the system we couldn't buy." — Pierre Ferran, Co-Founder and CEO of Kalipso
Kalipso was founded in 2025 and is based in Barcelona. It works with financial institutions and other regulated businesses across Europe. The platform covers major frameworks, including DORA, MiCAR, PSD2, the AI Act, GDPR, and MiFID II. The company is ISO 27001 certified, a common standard for information security, and keeps all customer data on European cloud servers.
In simple terms, the platform takes over a job that compliance teams usually do by hand. It scans regulatory updates as they happen, figures out which rules apply to a specific company, and compares those rules against existing policies to spot gaps. Then it suggests specific fixes. Each suggestion links directly back to the regulation it came from, so teams can see exactly why a change is needed. The aim is to bring monitoring, fixing problems, assigning ownership, and keeping records into one place, instead of spreading that work across separate systems.
Kalipso already works with clients including Groupe Caisse des Dépôts in France and Alma. Virginia Debernardi, the company's co-founder and COO, describes the product as something meant to cut through clutter rather than add to it.
"Compliance teams have been stitching together disconnected tools for too long. Kalipso closes that gap, taking organisations from regulatory change to implementing policies, controls and procedures inside a single system. Teams don't need another alert feed or another long report. They need infrastructure that turns regulation into action, and the peace of mind of knowing they are compliant." — Virginia Debernardi, Co-Founder and COO of Kalipso
Varsity led this $3.2 million round. The fund is known for backing a small number of startups each year and helping connect them with later-stage investors. Its portfolio also includes companies such as Akka, Bohr Energie, and C12 Quantum Electronics. Lanai, Plug and Play, Kima Ventures, and Vento also joined the round.
Didier Valet sits on Kalipso's board. Before co-founding Varsity, he spent nearly two decades as a senior executive at Société Générale, one of Europe's largest banks.
