糖心视频

For the founders of , the journey didn’t start with the Danish startup鈥檚 inception in 2023; it began a decade ago while working in the trenches of a payments company.

“We have this saying between the two of us,” explains CEO , referring to CTO and co-founder . “If there鈥檚 anything he can鈥檛 do, I can try to figure it out. And if there鈥檚 something I know I can鈥檛 do, I know he can do it.”

That combination 鈥� a blend of deep technical tradecraft and business intuition 鈥� first bore fruit in 2020 with the launch of a digital onboarding startup called . They went on to scale that venture (raising just 1.5 million EUR) before it to the Canadian identity verification company in under two years for more than $50 million.

After the sale, the pair took a brief hiatus before “getting the band back together” to start Spektr in the summer of 2023. This time, they brought along key team members from their previous journey 鈥� CPO and CRO 鈥� to tackle a persistent, expensive problem: the manual drudgery of financial compliance.

Put simply, their new venture, Spektr, provides infrastructure for compliance teams in financial services. It combines configurable workflows with AI agents that execute tasks such as document reviews, ownership mapping and risk analysis 鈥� work that has traditionally been manual and time-intensive.

Today, Copenhagen-based Spektr has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by , the company tells Crunchbase News exclusively.

Existing backers , and Tech also participated in the financing, which brought Spektr鈥檚 total raised to just under $26 million. The company declined to reveal its current valuation, saying only that it is a significant step up from its February 2024 seed round.

Building bridges

Compliance remains a stubbornly manual field. Analysts spend countless hours cross-referencing documents, researching registries and manually assessing risk. Spektr鈥檚 founders saw a massive misalignment between this sort of rule-based labor and what modern AI was suddenly capable of achieving.

The startup aims to serve as a bridge between the two worlds through its layer of agentic structures that sit atop old-school processes for onboarding, risk assessment and monitoring sanctions lists.

鈥淢ost compliance tools help you manage workflows,鈥� Skarnager said. 鈥淪pektr actually executes the work inside those workflows.鈥�

Its AI agents don鈥檛 just assist, he added. They perform specific compliance tasks end-to-end while maintaining 鈥渇ull transparency鈥� and a human-in-the-loop configuration, so teams 鈥渟tay in control.鈥�

Unlike legacy platforms that offer incremental improvements, such as better data organization, Spektr鈥檚 agents actually perform the analysis, said Skarnager.

“It鈥檚 not just about gathering data,” the CEO told Crunchbase News in an interview. “It鈥檚 about making the determination so the human can make the final decision.”

Momentum and market fit

Since launching “spektr 2.0” last August, which fully integrated these agent capabilities, the company has seen a boom in customer adoption.

“Clients really relate to that way of thinking,鈥� Skarnager said. “They鈥檙e used to building an onboarding journey, but now, in the same tool, they have the ability to create agents inside that same structure.”

Companies operating in this space include , and .

These systems play an important role in managing workflows, cases and data across the compliance lifecycle, Skarnager noted.

But, he said, Spektr sits one layer deeper.

鈥淲e automate the underlying execution of compliance work itself through specialized AI agents,鈥� he said.

Scaling the vision

With a headcount of 45 and growing, Spektr is currently focused on the heavy lifting required to serve banks and Tier 1 financial institutions. While the company is rooted in Copenhagen, its footprint is increasingly global.

Its new capital is earmarked for expansion. Plans include building out its engineering team to manage the complex needs of large banks and fintechs. The company also plans to open offices in London and New York to better serve a client base that already includes clients such as , Santander Leasing, , , and 鈥渕ajor鈥� U.S. marketplaces.

NEA partner believes that in a market where AI can mass-produce functionality, Spektr wins through “taste” and deep domain expertise.

The co-founders possess a “rare level of cohesion” and “operate at an instance speed,” allowing them to forgo slides for live demos that directly address use cases, according to Pappas.

Spektr鈥檚 product is architected for a shift where “software screens everything continuously” and experts “handle the exceptions,鈥� he said.

鈥淭his end-to-end automation leads to better decision making and error reduction,” he wrote via email.

Rather than forcing a total replacement of legacy tech at once, Spektr is “the only system that can coexist with existing solutions,” Pappas believes, providing the orchestration needed until “buyers can easily just switch over to spektr to handle everything in one place.”

Fintech startups, particularly those that apply AI to traditionally manual or burdensome processes, have benefited from increased investment in recent quarters. Total global funding to

VC-backed financial technology startups totaled $53.8 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase . That鈥檚 a more than 29% increase from 2024鈥檚 total of $41.6 billion raised.

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• Fintech Startups Globally Raise More Money In Far Fewer Deals In Q1 2026

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