Relace, a regulatory management startup for financial services firms, has raised £1.2 million in pre-seed funding led by Boost Capital, with participation from Ascension, Koro Capital and angel investors from JPMorgan, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, OpenAI and SAP. Funds will go into engineering hires, deepening regulatory coverage across the United Kingdom, EU, US and Middle East, and building the commercial team that works with regulated firms and their advisors.
Relace addresses how regulated firms manage their obligations, replacing static advice and inherited spreadsheets with a live picture of what applies to them and where they stand against it. The platform applies regulation to the specific firm in front of it, taking into account its operating model, products and services, and customers. From this, Relace establishes which obligations apply and how they apply, then tests the firm against them so it knows its regulatory posture, understands precisely where its gaps are and can work to close them. Every conclusion is traceable back to the rule it rests on, and coverage spans the United Kingdom, EU, US and Middle East.
The status quo for regulatory management typically relies on PDFs, inherited spreadsheets, email threads and advice that is expensive, incomplete, siloed and out of date by the time it arrives. A mid-sized firm deciding to launch a new product in a second jurisdiction will often spend three to six months simply establishing what is required, with obligations scattered across handbooks, guidance and consultation papers, interpreted by external counsel and reinterpreted internally, and with no durable record of why decisions were taken. Industry estimates put direct regulatory costs across financial services above $200bn a year, and firms respond by moving slower, hiring more people or carrying risks they cannot see clearly.
Relace was built on the thesis that these constraints are a technology problem rather than inherent to regulation, and that solving them changes what a firm can know about itself. A firm that knows its posture and knows its gaps can move at speed and with conviction, instead of slowly out of caution. Firms working with Relace include Gemcorp Capital, a $7B AUM private credit investor, which has used the platform to complete compliance work across two jurisdictions in days rather than weeks and to a standard suitable for board review.
Relace was recently selected for the second cohort of the Financial Conduct Authority's Supercharged Sandbox, the regulator's programme for developing and testing advanced AI in financial services, running to the end of 2026. Relace is one of 21 firms selected from 199 applications, and its work in the programme is focused on the Consumer Duty regime specifically.
As a compliance officer, you usually have to choose between speed and depth of analysis. Relace gave us both. Work that would normally take weeks was completed in a few days, in detail, across two jurisdictions, and to a standard we could put in front of the board.
Regulation has a reputation it does not deserve. What slows firms down is not the rules. It is not knowing where companies stand against them. When a firm can see exactly what applies to them, what it decided and what has just changed, the perception shifts from regulation being a barrier to the foundation that they can build from. The firm moves faster, customers get better products and revenues grow.
I have spent my career building technology used by hundreds of millions of people, and regulation is the hardest problem I have worked on. It is hard because the rules are written for everyone, and every firm is left to work out on its own what they mean for it. We automate that translation, then test the firm against the answer. A firm that knows its posture and knows its gaps is a firm in control, and it can prove it.
