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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00:00In terms of working in the U.S. versus Europe, what are some of the biggest differences culturally, business-wise,
00:06that you have to think about when you are selling this service to clients in those various regions?
00:10There's such an interesting comparison in where legal sits.
00:15So in Germany and Europe, legal mostly is under the CFO, reports to the CFO, doesn't really have their own budget.
00:23They're seen as a hurdle, not so positively enabling things.
00:30And then in the U.S., the legal departments, there's a CLO.
00:33So someone sits at the C-suite and they have much more power, so to say, also in deciding what they want and what they don't want.
00:42And then there's another difference.
00:44Legal operations is a function that every U.S. company has.
00:48It's like at least one person fully responsible just for optimizing processes because legal is known to be a bottleneck for a lot of other business purposes.
01:00And so the U.S. is very conscious about we need to enable the business, so we need to make legal quicker.
01:06And in Europe, the general counsel often has to do legal operations at night because he doesn't get a full-time position for just someone optimizing and implementing tools.
01:17There are the big corporates, they have that, but everyone else is really doing it on the side and then digitization doesn't work.