Kalipso,a Barcelona’s AI-based regtech that Virginia Debernardi (coo) and former Klarna legal counsel Pierre Ferran (ceo) founded in 2025, secured a 3.2 million US Dollars seed round (2.81 million euros) (press release). Sources said to BeBeez that the company started the round in 2025.
Kalipso attracted the resources of Vento, a venture building programme that Exor Ventures launched in 2021; Varsity, a a Paris early stage investor that Didier Valet (the former deputy ceo of Société Générale) created in 2023, Kamel Zeroual and Florent Thomas (former investors in Serena Capital), Lanai Partners, a Barcelona’s early stage venture capital born in 2016 for digital startups that groups business angels; Paris Kima Ventures, a vehicle that Xavier Niel and Jérémie Berrebi created in 2010, and Plug and Play Tech Center, an Italian open innovation platform that manages national programmes in collaboration with CDP Venture Capital and several corporate partners.
Lawyers and engineers developed Kalipso to help organisations adopt and implement regulatory changes. Groupe Caisse des Dépôts in France and Alma (a Buy Now Pay Later company) already work with Kalipso whose services are seeing growing demand from the compliance departments of large organisations and banks that must manage increasingly complex regulatory compliance. The platform covers the main regulatory frameworks, including Dora, MiCAR, PSD2, AI Act, Gdpr, and MiFID II. Kalipso has a certification ISO 27001 and stores all data on sovereign European cloud infrastructures.
Kalipso founders Pierre Ferran and Virginia Debernardi
The proceeds of this round will support the company’s organic growth and expansion in key international markets, notably Italy, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and the Benelux countries in response to growing global demand for AI-based Regulatory Technology infrastructure.
This funding round is part of a wider transformation of the compliance landscape. The European Commission is currently pursuing an ambitious agenda of regulatory reforms, significantly increasing the operational burden on in-house legal and compliance teams.
Varsity co-founder Valet, a member of the Board of Directors and investor, said: “I spent most of my career at one of Europe’s largest banks, where compliance is still largely manual, fragmented and lagging behind. What convinced me about Kalipso is the team: two founding partners who understand the law and possess the engineering skills essential to build the product, tailoring it to an industry they know from the inside out. This is the infrastructure the industry needs.”
Kalipso Team
Debernardi and Ferran gained legal, technological and operational expertise in high-growth technology companies.
Debernardi (coo) worked for European institutions and subsequently served as general counsel at Productsup, a rapidly expanding company and has expertise in intellectual property compliance. She said: “For too long, compliance teams had to manage their activities with disjointed tools. Kalipso bridges that gap, guiding organisations from regulatory changes to the implementation of policies, controls and procedures within a single system. Teams do not need yet another report or communication, but rather an infrastructure that translates regulatory changes into action and the peace of mind that comes from knowing they are always compliant”.
Ferran (ceo) held senior legal roles at Klarna and Philips and is also a software engineer (LL.M., Stanford). He commented: “The hardest part of compliance is not interpreting the law but turning it into action. And almost no one who builds solutions in this sector truly experienced both perspectives. I have. At Klarna, I worked at the intersection of the legal and engineering worlds and saw first-hand where and why these processes get stuck. Many lawyers who don’t understand the technological complexities, or engineers who don’t fully grasp the law developed many tools on the market. Kalipso was born precisely from the convergence of these two areas of expertise. We didn’t just observe this problem from the outside: we lived through it and built the platform that we ourselves would have wanted to use.”
A platform that translates the abstract provisions of new legislation into operational processes is the heart of Kalipso. The tool directly draws from various full traceable sources and analyses any regulatory or legislative updates in real time and translates these changes into obligations applicable to each organisation while identifying any gaps in existing company policies and practices and generating ready-to-implement solutions ensuring the organisation’s full legal compliance. Every recommendation or suggestion directly links to the relevant regulatory requirement. The centralised monitoring of sources allows to carry on in a single operational environment the analysis of issues, the assignment of internal responsibilities and the conduct of all audit processes. Kalipso enables legal and compliance teams to move beyond a reactive and fragmented approach to regulatory compliance through the adoption of continuous monitoring. The platform monitors over 100 sources across more than 40 jurisdictions and processes over 3,000 regulatory updates daily.
Kalipso Regulatory Radar is a module that enables companies to ensure comprehensive coverage of the entire compliance cycle: from the initial legislative stages of any regulation, through communications from the regulatory body to definitively approved laws and guidelines from supervisory authorities. Isers are always up to date with developments affecting their business model. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the platform can highlight the most significant regulatory developments for the client on the ground of their business model, geographical exposure and operational profile.
Every time is necessary the implementation of a new legal requirement, it is necessary to get familiar with it, interpret it, assess its impact on the company, identify any gaps in the existing documentation, make the necessary changes to internal policies and processes, assign eventually required responsibilities and controls, and demonstrate that the implementation is correct. Today, the management of this process is often manual, sometimes with the support of Excel spreadsheets or reports that many consultancy firms. Kalipso aims to offer an innovative solution to a long-standing problem with a software that has all the essential information and procedures a company needs to stay handle regulatory changes in a simple, consistent and efficient manner in line with its internal processes.
