Karavel, an AI-powered compliance platform built for highly regulated sectors, has secured £1.25 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by Fuel Ventures.
The investment will support product development and accelerate Karavel’s commercial expansion across the UK and Europe, as the company looks to modernise compliance workflows for organisations facing increasingly complex regulatory scrutiny.
Karavel is designed for legal, compliance and marketing teams operating in sectors such as financial services, fintech, insurance, healthcare and consumer credit. Its platform brings together regulatory monitoring, marketing and advertising reviews, horizon scanning and compliance gap analysis into a single, AI-driven interface, replacing the fragmented and manual processes still widely used across regulated industries.
The funding comes at a time when the pressure on compliance teams is intensifying. Regulatory frameworks are expanding, enforcement is increasing and the cost of non-compliance continues to rise. Despite this, many organisations still rely on spreadsheets, manual reporting and external legal support to track regulatory change and approve communications, creating bottlenecks, slowing product launches and driving up costs.
Founded by Pedro Sousa and Nav Garcha, Karavel was built in response to these challenges. The pair bring experience from companies including Revolut, Deliveroo, CNN and ClearScore, and say the platform was born out of their own frustration with outdated compliance systems.
Karavel’s technology automates financial promotion and advertising reviews, monitors regulatory updates in real time and flags relevant changes as they occur. Its AI analyses new rules, extracts applicable requirements and provides clear, actionable guidance to help teams respond quickly and confidently.
The company says the results are already significant. Its AdCheck tool allows financial promotions to be reviewed up to three times faster, with a 91 per cent first-pass approval rate. Meanwhile, its horizon scanning capability replaces bi-weekly manual reporting with daily automated alerts, delivering efficiency gains of up to fourteen times and reducing external legal spend by as much as 73 per cent within the first year.
Pedro Sousa, co-founder of Karavel, said the platform was built to address the real-world pressures compliance professionals face every day.
“During my time as a head of compliance, I experienced first-hand the manual, repetitive work, fragmented processes and constant anxiety that something important might be missed,” he said. “We built Karavel to give compliance, legal and marketing teams the clarity, automation and confidence I always wished I’d had in previous roles.”
Mark Pearson, founder of Fuel Ventures, said Karavel was tackling one of the most pressing operational challenges in regulated sectors.
“Karavel is redefining how organisations interpret regulations, review content and coordinate across teams,” he said. “The founders have combined deep compliance expertise with advanced AI to replace outdated workflows with intelligent systems that deliver real commercial impact. We’re proud to support their vision as they scale.”
With regulatory scrutiny showing no signs of easing, Karavel is positioning itself as a core infrastructure platform for organisations that need to move quickly without compromising compliance.
