The Copenhagen fintech has built a platform of specialised AI agents that handle KYC and KYB work, document reviews, ownership mapping, risk rationale, in minutes rather than hours. NEA led the Series A; Northzone, Seedcamp, and PSV Tech participated.

Spektr, a Copenhagen-based startup building AI infrastructure for financial compliance, has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by NEA, with continued participation from existing investors Northzone, Seedcamp, and PSV Tech.

The round brings total funding to just under $26 million, and will be used to expand Spektr’s engineering team, accelerate adoption among banks and large financial institutions, and open offices in London and New York. 

Spektr’s pitch is built on a specific frustration: that despite years of investment in compliance technology, most KYC and KYB work is still done by analysts manually.

The typical compliance review at a bank involves searching company registries, cross-referencing documents from multiple sources, mapping beneficial ownership structures, and writing risk rationales by hand, work that looks the same every day, is difficult to audit consistently, and scales poorly as regulatory volume increases.

Most of the tools built to address this have focused on workflow management and data aggregation, which reduces friction but does not eliminate the underlying analytical labour.

Spektr’s response is a platform of specialised AI agents that perform the analytical work itself, researching companies, verifying business activity, interpreting documents from multiple sources, generating structured risk assessments, with compliance teams reviewing and approving results rather than producing them from scratch.

According to the company, work that previously took an analyst hours completes in minutes. Financial institutions can design their own onboarding and monitoring workflows and deploy networks of these agents within them, turning manual analyst-driven processes into automated operations that can run at the scale of a large bank’s customer portfolio.

The platform handles both onboarding and ongoing monitoring, covering KYC, KYB, source-of-funds checks, document review, and false-positive reduction across the compliance lifecycle.

NEA partner Luke Pappas, who led the investment, told Crunchbase News he believes Spektr wins through “taste” and deep domain expertise in a market where AI can mass-produce functionality.

The company’s customers include Pleo, Santander Leasing, Mercuryo, Phantom, and Monta, as well as what the company describes as major US marketplace clients.

Pappas characterised Spektr’s differentiation as the ability to “coexist with existing solutions” while providing orchestration for compliance teams that are not yet ready to consolidate onto a single vendor.

CEO and co-founder Mikkel Skarnager described the core problem in the company’s announcement:

“Compliance technology has mostly focused on workflow and data collection. But the real bottleneck has always been the work itself, analysts researching companies, interpreting information, and documenting decisions.”

The company was seeded in February 2024 and has grown to 45 employees, with the new capital earmarked to scale engineering capacity for the more complex technical requirements of serving Tier 1 banks and large fintechs.