Let's face it, compliance is boring--but not Lisa Gradow. For her, it's an exciting opportunity to give the industry a much needed AI upgrade. She founded Fides, a software company, to tackle the often monotonous work of financial regulations. Fides’s safe and secure tech spares us humans the drudgery of tracking deadlines, sourcing regulatory data, and creating legal documents. “Nobody gets claps for doing it very well,” says Gradow. “So it's something that can be and should be automated.” She started Fides in 2021 and has raised $7.6 million in funding from investors including Sequoia and General Catalyst. Current clients include Allianz, Haribo, Faber-Castell, and Sequoia. Says Gradow: “For us it’s very important to stay a European company, but with a global footprint.”
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00:00How did you decide that this was a sector of the industry you wanted to embark on?
00:04Was there like a moment that you realized this was a pain point for people and founders?
00:08Or what was the inspiration here?
00:10In my previous role, I co-founded UserCentrix, which is now close to being a unicorn.
00:16And so myself, I was in the role of, you know, running a board and having to manage here and there corporate processes.
00:24And then I also became an angel investor.
00:26I invested in 15 companies as an angel and became a shareholder there.
00:29So my inbox started to pile up with a lot of PDFs, DocuSign here and Adobe Sign there.
00:35And then two years later, the tax advisor asked me like, oh, what was this resolution with this company?
00:40And I'm like, I don't know.
00:41And I also don't know where to find it.
00:43Yeah, I started looking and I found some tools around that, like single use case tools for parts of that.
00:53I was like, how can that be?
00:54Like, I cannot be the first one to struggle with a PDF, sell it in my inbox.
00:59And when I didn't find anything, yeah, I thought then someone has to build it.
01:04And corporate law was my focus in law school.
01:07So I also have a passion really for the corporate law because it's so structured and standardizable.
01:14Yeah, in the years from founding Fides to today, how has it changed?
01:20What new things have you implemented?
01:22What has that growth looked like?
01:24We started when ChatGPT and Gen.ai wasn't there.
01:28So in the beginning, we had built our own models to quickly extract information from the documents.
01:34Now with Gen.ai available, of course, it's a totally different thing.
01:38And we're a way for the legal departments and the boardrooms to really confidentially and securely use AI.
01:46Right now, they have no capability to do that.
01:50And especially in the boardroom, you have like 300 page stacks where it really makes sense to use ChatGPT to prepare for a reading.
01:56But you're not allowed to because it's too confidential.
01:59So there, this is something that now we can provide to our customers a secure place for very, very confidential documents and data where we can promise them nothing will ever go out.
02:11We don't train with that data.
02:13We are just searching through your documents, no hallucinations whatsoever.
02:16And this has become a runner, so to say, because companies are looking for that right now.