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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00:00What have been some of the biggest challenges in the kind of combination of finance, technology,
00:05compliance, law, all of those are such dense industries. How have you, have you come up
00:11against any hurdles? How have you kind of gotten past those? I think the biggest hurdle is getting
00:17lawyers to change their behavior. So they have just gotten used to the way they did things. And
00:25we have both customers in the US and in Europe. And what we see with the European ones,
00:30is that they've been really doing it with pen and paper. And in the US, we also see a lot of
00:35companies that have used incumbent tools. So we have to start telling them actually, there's a
00:42better way. So it starts with education, with thought leadership. And we have this community
00:47called Circle of Councils, where we have monthly events in rotating cities. And we actually meet
00:52with councils personally, so we can get the conversation rolling on, hey, there's a better
00:58way to do this. So this is the biggest challenge actually, to get the word out. But now, we're
01:05at a point where in Germany and also in the US, there's, we see the word of mouth effect. Because
01:11now we have companies that are using it in the board. And then all the external board members
01:16start using it too. And then they're telling each other. So this is the nice, yeah, viral effect
01:21about our tool. Yeah, definitely.