London-based Zango has raised £3.5m in a round led by Nexus Venture Partners, a leading global venture capital firm with over £2bn capital under management. Other participants in the latest round include South Park Commons, Richard Davies, CEO of Allica Bank, Alan Morgan, former head of Financial Services at McKinsey (EMEA), Mark Ransford, Notion Capital, No Label Ventures and Start Ventures.
Zango is actively used by established banks such as Novobanco, the fourth-largest bank in Portugal, and is gaining traction with leading neo banks in the EU and UK, including Monzo and Juni.
Today, financial services regulations stretch across tens of thousands of pages, creating slow, manual workflows and significant costs for businesses striving to stay compliant. Zango addresses this critical challenge by transforming regulatory complexity into a clear list of requirements. Its innovative solution is training regulation-specific Large Language Models (LLMs) to make compliance as intuitive as a simple query, enabling businesses to launch new products and expand into new markets with unprecedented speed and confidence - helping compliance be a growth centre rather than just a cost centre.
With Zango.ai, compliance becomes as simple as a Google query: “I want to launch a lending product in [Y] market - what do I need to do?”
Zango’s AI agents do not just read and interpret regulations with a high degree of accuracy - they integrate into a company’s day-to-day operations. In one example, a workflow with one of the banks involving the regulator was reduced from 48 hours to under 4 hours, showcasing the power of AI in regulated environments. Compliance becomes a continuous, always-on process rather than a one-time checklist. Traditional consultants give you a green light at a moment in time. But fast-growing businesses change quickly. Six months later, that green light is irrelevant - and by the time a regulator shows up, you could be out of bounds.
Zango was co-founded by Ritesh Singhania and Shashank Agarwal, both second-time founders with deep experience in regulatory technology. Ritesh previously founded ClearGlass, a pension compliance platform, and served as Head of Technology at Simplitium (acquired by NASDAQ). Shashank co-founded Third Watch, an AI-powered fraud detection startup (acquired by Razorpay, valued at £5.9bn+) and led trust and compliance engineering at PhonePe, which is gearing up for India’s largest IPO.
The funds raised will be used to expand teams in London and Bengaluru along with building out the other product modules for an AI-native GRC. Zango will expand into other verticals of financial services as well outside of banking to insurance and asset management.
