A pair of former Revolut employees have quietly raised £2.5m in pre-seed funding from Lightspeed and Cocoa for their business verification startup Condukt, according to Companies House filings.
Other investors in the round include Tiny VC and Atomico partner and former Revolut exec Don Hoang, according to a March filing.
Condukt is part of an ever-growing list of startups to emerge from Revolut, which is one of European fintech’s most productive “founder factories” — its alumni have produced at least 34 second-generation startups according to a recent report by Accel and Dealroom.
Cofounders Paulo Guichard, formerly head of operations and product owner at Revolut, and Bhasker Rao, formerly head of acquiring risk at Revolut, have been busy building the startup in stealth since the beginning of last year, as Sifted previously reported. Guichard and Rao declined to comment on the funding round.
What are they working on?
Condukt’s website currently describes the project as “just another KYB provider”. KYB (or know your business) is the process of verifying the identity of a company, its ownership structure and its business activities to ensure compliance and anti-money laundering (AML) processes before onboarding them as a customer.
It’s a nascent but growing sector in Europe. Several digital KYB providers have popped up recently in response to mounting regulatory scrutiny on financial companies and fintechs, including Berlin’s TransactionLink and Stockholm-HQ’d Bits Technology. Both raised seed funding in the last year to build no-code tools so that companies can quickly run KYB processes to onboard prospective business clients in a compliant way.
In January this year, the EU agreed upon more stringent anti-money laundering measures following a 2021 package of proposals presented by the European Commission. The new measures require businesses to enhance due diligence processes and disclose financial information to relevant regulatory authorities.
