The round was led by Boost Capital, with participation from Ascension, Koro Capital and angel investors from JPMorgan, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, OpenAI and SAP.

LONDON, 15 October 2026. Trading has a system. Payments have a system. Onboarding, credit, fraud, reporting: all systems. Regulatory management has a folder. It runs on PDFs, inherited spreadsheets, email threads and advice that is expensive, incomplete, siloed and out of date by the time it arrives.

Relace has raised $1.6m in pre-seed funding, led by Boost Capital, to change that. The platform applies regulation to the specific firm in front of it: its operating model, its products and services, and its customers. From that it establishes which obligations apply and how they apply, then tests the firm against them, so the firm knows its regulatory posture, knows precisely where its gaps are, and can work to close them. Every conclusion is traceable back to the rule it rests on. The platform covers the UK, EU, US and Middle East.

The cost of the status quo is speed. A mid-sized firm deciding to launch a new product in a second jurisdiction will typically spend three to six months simply establishing what is required of it: obligations scattered across handbooks, guidance and consultation papers, interpreted by external counsel, reinterpreted internally, with no durable record of why anything was decided. Add a market, a product or a customer type and the obligations compound exponentially. Firms respond by moving slower, hiring more people, or carrying risks they cannot see clearly. Industry estimates put direct regulatory costs across financial services above $200bn a year.

The larger cost is the products that are never launched.

Relace was built on the thesis that none of this is inherent to regulation. It is a technology problem nobody has solved, and solving it changes what a firm can know about itself. It is the difference between estimating regulatory risk and measuring it. A firm that knows its posture and knows its gaps can move at speed and with conviction, instead of slowly out of caution.

Firms working with Relace include Gemcorp Capital, a $7B AUM private credit investor.

“As a compliance officer, you usually have to choose between speed and depth of analysis. Relace gave us both. Work that would normally take weeks was completed in a few days, in detail, across two jurisdictions, and to a standard we could put in front of the board.” Patrick Nyamangunda, Chief Compliance Officer and MLRO, Gemcorp Capital

“Regulation has a reputation it does not deserve,” said Justin Peimani, co-founder of Relace, a New York-qualified lawyer who spent a decade building enterprise offerings used by 20 of the top 50 global banks. “What slows firms down is not the rules. It is not knowing where companies stand against them. When a firm can see exactly what applies to them, what it decided and what has just changed, the perception shifts from regulation being a barrier to the foundation that they can build from. The firm moves faster, customers get better products and revenues grow.”

“I have spent my career building technology used by hundreds of millions of people, and regulation is the hardest problem I have worked on,” said Lyubomira Dimitrova, co-founder of Relace, who scaled AI systems at Onfido serving more than 200 million annual users across financial services. “It is hard because the rules are written for everyone, and every firm is left to work out on its own what they mean for it. We automate that translation, then test the firm against the answer. A firm that knows its posture and knows its gaps is a firm in control, and it can prove it.”

Relace was recently selected for the second cohort of the Financial Conduct Authority’s Supercharged Sandbox, the regulator’s programme for developing and testing advanced AI in financial services, running to the end of 2026. Relace is one of 21 firms selected from 199 applications, and its work in the programme is focused on the Consumer Duty regime specifically.

The $1.6m will go into engineering hires, deepening regulatory coverage across the UK, EU, US and Middle East, and building the commercial team that works with regulated firms and their advisors.

“Startups are all about the team and the target. Regulatory management still runs on someone’s memory, spreadsheets, siloed systems and broken information flows. It is a market frozen in time. Unlocking it takes a rare pairing of technology and regulatory depth, and Relace has it. I worked with Lyubomira at Onfido and saw how she thinks about regulated markets: not as a constraint, but as an enabler of growth. Backing her again was an easy decision.” - Husayn Kassai, co-founder of Onfido, founder and chief executive of ollo, and angel investor in Relace, commented.

“We saw a rare combination of legal, go-to-market and technical expertise that can only come from serving the world’s largest financial institutions at scale. It is exactly the right combination to build trust and capture a market of this size and sophistication.” - Pablo Morenes, Partner, Boost Capital Partners

The round was led by Boost Capital, with participation from Ascension, Koro Capital and angel investors including a former chief technology officer at JPMorgan, and senior executives from Barclays, Morgan Stanley, OpenAI and SAP.

About Relace

Relace automates regulatory management and adherence for financial services firms. The platform applies regulation to the specifics of a firm: its operating model, products, services and customers. It establishes which obligations apply and how, then tests the firm against them so it knows its posture, its gaps, and what it takes to close them. Every assessment is traceable to the source it rests on. Founded in London in 2025 by Justin Peimani and Lyubomira Dimitrova, Relace serves regulated firms and their advisors across the UK, EU, US and Middle East, and was selected for the second cohort of the FCA’s Supercharged Sandbox. withrelace.com