Spektr Founders: How a $50M Exit Led to a $20M Compliance Startup

Most founders who exit a company for eight figures take some time off. Some never come back at all.

Mikkel Skarnager and Ciprian Florescu took a brief break — then rebuilt their old team to do it again.

The two Danish entrepreneurs previously built HelloFlow, a no-code onboarding platform, and sold it to identity verification company Trulioo for more than $50 million in under two years.

Then, in the summer of 2023, they reunited to start Spektr, an AI compliance platform for banks and financial institutions — and brought along two of their old HelloFlow teammates to do it.

Spektr has now raised a $20 million Series A, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), bringing its total funding to just under $26 million.

The company is based in Copenhagen and was founded in 2023.

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The First Act: HelloFlow

Skarnager and Florescu's earlier company, HelloFlow, launched in 2020 as a no-code platform designed to help businesses onboard clients faster and more easily.

It moved quickly — the company raised roughly €1.5 million and was acquired by Trulioo for more than $50 million in under two years.

That's a fast, clean exit by most startup standards. But according to the founders, one problem kept resurfacing throughout the HelloFlow journey: compliance work doesn't stop once onboarding is finished. It's an ongoing, expensive, manual burden — and nobody had really fixed it.

That unfinished problem is what eventually pulled the team back together.

Reassembling the Team, On Purpose

After the HelloFlow sale, Skarnager and Florescu took a short pause before regrouping. When they came back, they didn't come back alone.

They brought Jeremy Joly, who had served as CPO at HelloFlow, and Jan-Erik Aabo Wagner, who had been CRO — both joining Spektr in the same functional roles. That's a notable detail: rather than assembling a brand-new team from scratch, the founders rebuilt a group that had already worked together successfully once.

NEA partner Luke Pappas, who led Spektr's Series A, has pointed to that cohesion directly as one of the reasons his firm backed the company — describing the founding team as having a "rare level of cohesion" that lets them move fast, including forgoing slide decks in favor of live product demos.

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What Spektr Actually Does

Spektr's pitch centers on a specific claim: most compliance software helps teams manage their workflows, but doesn't actually do the compliance work itself.

Skarnager has framed the core problem directly — compliance technology has mostly focused on workflow and data collection, while the real bottleneck has always been the underlying work: analysts researching companies, interpreting information, and documenting decisions by hand.

Spektr's platform combines configurable workflows with AI agents that execute specific compliance tasks end-to-end — document reviews, ownership mapping, sanctions list monitoring, and risk analysis — rather than simply organizing the process for a human to complete manually.

The company has said its agents operate with a human-in-the-loop structure, meaning compliance teams still review and approve outputs rather than have decisions made fully autonomously.

That's a meaningful design choice in a regulated industry where "fully autonomous AI decision-making" tends to raise red flags with regulators and auditors alike.

Spektr's live customers reportedly include Pleo, Santander Leasing, Monta, Phantom, and Mercuryo — a mix of fintechs and a major traditional financial institution, which is a useful signal that the product works for both startup-native and legacy-bank compliance environments.

The Funding, and What's Next

Spektr's Series A was led by NEA, with continued participation from existing backers Northzone, Seedcamp, and PSV Tech. That combination — a large US-based firm leading, alongside European seed investors doubling down — is a reasonably strong signal of investor confidence continuing across funding stages, not just at the initial pitch.

The company has said it will use the new capital to expand its engineering team to serve the more complex compliance needs of large banks, and to open new offices in London and New York — a clear signal that Spektr, despite its Copenhagen roots, is positioning itself as a global compliance infrastructure company rather than a regional one.

The honest caveat here is the same one that applies to most compliance-AI startups right now: the hardest part isn't building agents that can research and summarize — it's getting regulators and bank examiners fully comfortable relying on AI-generated risk assessments at scale.

Spektr's human-in-the-loop framing is clearly designed to address that concern, but how well it holds up inside actual bank examinations over the next few years is still an open question, not a solved one.

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