With $3.2 million in new funding, Kalipso founders Pierre Ferran and Virginia Debernardi are building the system they wished they had after years working inside legal and compliance teams – one that finds the relevant law, connects it to the business and gives teams something they can act on.
When a colleague asked Pierre Ferran for help renewing the company’s Apple developer licence, the problem appeared to be a single yes-or-no question.
Apple wanted to know whether the business was a ‘trader’ under the EU’s Digital Services Act. The question blocked the renewal process, while the accompanying note offered little beyond a warning that Apple could not provide legal advice.
Ferran, then working as an in-house lawyer, began going through the legislation. Most of the Digital Services Act had little relevance to the company, yet several lawyers and product staff became involved before they found the definition and two small sections that applied.
How they answered had immediate consequences. Without the developer licence, the company could not publish updates to an app used by millions of people.
“Nobody has time to read an entire regulation to find the two paragraphs that apply to them,” Ferran says. A system should have been able to identify the relevant sections, explain where they came from and leave the lawyer to make the judgement call, rather than spend hours on what he describes as “archaeology”.
The experience helped shape Kalipso, the regulatory technology company Ferran founded with Virginia Debernardi in 2025.
The Barcelona-headquartered business has now raised $3.2 million led by Varsity, with participation from Lanai, Plug and Play, Kima Ventures and Vento. It plans to deepen its presence across the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Benelux while continuing to develop its platform.
Kalipso monitors more than 100 regulatory sources across over 40 jurisdictions and processes more than 3,000 updates a day. Its customers include French public financial group Groupe Caisse des Dépôts and buy now, pay later provider Alma.
Its focus lies in the work that begins once a new law, piece of guidance or supervisory decision appears. The platform identifies which developments apply to a customer, maps them against products and policies, highlights gaps and suggests changes linked to the original source.
Lawyers who learned to build
Ferran and Debernardi met while studying European law at Maastricht University. They worked together on university projects and conferences before taking different routes into legal and compliance roles.
Debernardi went into intellectual property and knowledge management, worked at the European Union Intellectual Property Office and later became general counsel at Productsup, a German software company.
Ferran’s path combined law with an interest that began much earlier. He started writing software at 13 because he wanted to create modifications for the video game Minecraft. He continued coding as a teenager and still maintains open-source projects built during that period.
After university, he worked in legal technology and privacy, completed a master’s degree at Stanford University and later joined Klarna. There, he worked as a lawyer inside the engineering organisation and began developing internal tools alongside software teams.
“As a lawyer embedded in engineering at Klarna, I watched those handoffs fail in real time,” he says. “We didn’t abstract this problem – we lived it, and we built the system we couldn’t buy.”
The two founders had already tested their working relationship through a small consulting project during the pandemic, focused on Web3 and consumer protection. By the time they began Kalipso, both had spent years watching legal and compliance teams repeat work they believed software could handle more effectively.
Ferran describes part of the motivation with some self-deprecation.
“We’re both very lazy and driven by frustration,” he says. “We would rather fix problems.”
The frustration came from seeing skilled people spend their time searching through documents, copying information between systems and rebuilding the same analysis each time a rule changed.
An alert is only the beginning
The main competition facing a new compliance platform is often manual work rather than another piece of software.
“The real incumbent isn’t software, it’s people,” the pair say.
Many compliance teams still organise regulatory updates through spreadsheets, shared drives, email and advice from external law firms. A consultant may send a list of developments, which somebody inside the organisation must then assess.
That person has to decide whether the update applies, identify the relevant products and policies, find the people responsible and record the eventual response.
Debernardi says the available technology often covers one part of that process. Established governance, risk and compliance systems can manage tasks and approvals but tend to be rigid.
Horizon-scanning tools monitor regulatory sources and alert teams when something changes. Legal information services provide access to the underlying law.
The pieces seldom connect.
“Sometimes you get substance, sometimes you get workflow, but you don’t get the two together,” she says.
An alert can be accurate and timely while leaving most of the job untouched.
“An alert isn’t an answer,” according to Kalipso, “It doesn’t tell you whether it hits you or what to do about it.”
Kalipso follows the change further. Its Regulatory Radar monitors developments across the full lifecycle, including early legislative activity, consultation papers, final rules, supervisory guidance and later interpretations.
The platform then prioritises updates based on the customer’s business model, markets and operations. Once a final text appears, it can assess which parts of the organisation may be affected.
A new rule might apply to a consumer credit product and two related policies, for example, while having little bearing on the rest of the business.
The customer can then start a gap analysis, review proposed policy amendments and send changes through its usual ownership and approval process. Each recommendation remains connected to the legal material behind it.
Kalipso also gives teams early warning of developments that may affect them. Ferran draws a line between useful notice and asking compliance staff to follow every amendment and political discussion. The deeper analysis begins when the legal text is settled enough to assess properly.
“The goal is that you open Kalipso in the morning, see there’s a new law, look at the gap analysis and go: ‘OK, this hits my product, let me loop in my product owner,’” says Ferran. “It sounds simple. That’s the point.”
AI with boundaries
The timing of Kalipso’s launch was tied closely to improvements in large language models.
Ferran and Debernardi had encountered the same compliance problems for years, but earlier technology was more suited to keyword searches and fixed workflows than substantive legal analysis.
By 2025, they felt commercially available models could support the kind of reasoning they needed. That has not led them to use a language model for every task. Kalipso handles procedural and verification work through deterministic systems where possible, reserving AI for areas that require interpretation or synthesis.
Ferran says teams sometimes apply AI across an entire process because it is quicker to build that way.
Kalipso’s engineers begin by asking whether a task can be completed reliably without it.
“We have a principle which the engineers really don’t like,” he says. “We do not, by default, use AI where we don’t have to.”
The distinction carries particular weight in compliance, where a confident but unsupported answer can send a business in the wrong direction.
Kalipso restricts its models to regulatory material already stored within the platform. The system does not rely on a model’s general knowledge or search the open internet when preparing a recommendation.
Citations link the output to particular articles, while background checks verify that the cited text exists. Customers can open the source within the platform and compare it with the proposed amendment.
Ferran says the team also looks for signs that a model has invented a reference.
“We’d rather block an output and tell you, ‘Sorry, we can’t say this,’ than hand you something random,” he says.
Debernardi says usefulness deserves equal attention. A generic AI tool may produce a lengthy legal answer that sounds plausible but fails to reflect the company, product or task in front of it. The compliance team then inherits another document to interpret and turn into action.
Human judgement remains part of Kalipso’s design. The system suggests an interpretation or amendment, while the compliance professional decides how it fits the organisation.
“Human judgement is organic to the platform, not bolted on. We suggest, but you decide,” they say.
The company is ISO 27001 certified and stores its data on European sovereign cloud infrastructure. Those arrangements address some of the security and governance questions raised by regulated institutions, although Ferran says customers tend to focus most heavily on hallucination, missing information and output quality.
Depth before breadth
Maintaining more than 100 regulatory sources requires more work than the number might suggest.
Public bodies change their websites and document formats. A feed that usually contains formal guidance may suddenly publish an interview or unrelated announcement. Some regulators offer structured data, while others publish information in ways that require far more effort to collect and organise.
Ferran recalls one occasion when Kalipso’s monitoring picked up a magazine interview with European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde. It had appeared on the central bank’s website, which the platform needed to follow, but it was hardly the regulatory development a customer expected to receive.
The company has chosen to concentrate on what it calls its “prime 50” markets rather than claim coverage of almost every country.
Ferran is sceptical of platforms promoting thousands of sources across 180 or 190 jurisdictions, especially when customers need dependable depth in a much smaller number of places.
“Realistically, not a single organisation out there is going to need 180 countries, except if you’re the United Nations,” he says.
France, Italy, Spain and the UK are early priorities because of their financial sectors and the founders’ own experience. Ferran is French and has worked in the UK, while Debernardi is Italian and speaks Spanish.
The team can read original texts and understand the legal systems in those markets while building out the coverage. Debernardi says human review still plays a role when a new jurisdiction is added, particularly when deciding which sources carry authority and how different rules connect.
Different pressures from fintechs and banks
Kalipso works with growing fintechs as well as larger financial institutions, although their priorities differ.
Smaller companies want a system that can go live quickly and make a small compliance team more productive.
They also bring greater pressure on price and have little patience for lengthy implementations.
Alma, Kalipso’s first design partner, wanted to increase the capacity of its compliance team and support expansion into new markets.
Enterprise customers have more complicated approval structures, audit requirements and internal ownership. They may also carry years of frustration with older compliance systems, making them wary of adding another tool.
Ferran says working with both groups helps shape the product. Smaller companies force Kalipso to keep the experience fast and straightforward. Larger institutions expose the platform to more complicated workflows and the realities of operating across several business units and jurisdictions.
The latest funding will support targeted recruitment rather than rapid hiring for its own sake. Ferran says advances in AI-assisted software development have allowed Kalipso to reduce some of its original hiring assumptions while keeping up the pace of product work.
The company plans to deepen its coverage in its first European markets, develop additional capabilities for financial institutions and consider opportunities in other regulated sectors.
Compliance teams have spent years adapting general systems, spreadsheets and legal advice to work that rarely fitted neatly into any of them. Kalipso’s proposition is that the technology can now take on more of the search, comparison and mapping, while leaving the final call with the people responsible.
The end result Ferran describes is deliberately ordinary: a compliance professional opens the system, sees what has changed and knows who needs to act.
“It sounds simple,” he says. “That’s the point.”
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