“I don’t know what possessed us to leave sexy Tinder and go into compliance.” The immersive room at LuxExpo The Box is packed and the audience is laughing at the anecdote that saw Ruben Miessen, Kasper Verbeeck, Dennis Montégnies and Gregory Vekemans leave Tinder, in 2023, to launch their own startup. None of the four are on stage. Legalfy’s CEO Ruben Miessen left it to his head of solution engineering, Clemens Repp, to take a train from London to Paris, then from Paris to Luxembourg, to defend a project that started like a rocket.

After raising €2m very quickly, Legalfly added another €15m this summer in a series A funding round led by Notion Capital, with the participation of Redalpine and Fortino Capital. It’s a sign of investor confidence that the regtech will find its audience. Its solution can automate the work that has the least added value--at an insurer, but in other environments as well--compliance with GDPR, Dora or SFDR and numerous European or national laws.

began by solving a problem faced by the Luxembourg financial centre and insurance industry: it ensures that the data remains in the bank or insurance environment, where it is anonymised so that the solution can check that the contract or document is compliant. And that’s for a given country, since even European directives can be made even stricter by a member state.

“We estimated during the preparation of this final that we could have saved the Foyer Group 3,000 hours of work,” says Miessen during his presentation. This did not fall on deaf ears, as , vice-chairman of Foyer’s board of directors, and , deputy CEO of Foyer, were in the room.

“We were the legacy actors that the startups wanted to replace,” laughs Lauer on stage at the end of the event, as if talking about dinosaurs. “But we’re still here!” After digitalisation minister  (DP) recalled Luxembourg’s strategy around data and artificial intelligence, Lauer also highlighted the special feature of the Aca event with the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (Lhoft) and the Plug-and-play, a hybrid format between sandbox and hackathon, where experts come and help startups not only to fine-tune their pitch but also to adapt it to Luxembourg reality.

This year, six startups out of 66 candidates qualified to compete on one of the two proposed themes, digitising processes and improving customer relations, “two critical subjects,” according to Aca deputy CEO . In addition to two startups already well known in Luxembourg, , delayed by the freezing of the Luxembourg digital wallet project, and U-Reg, winner of the first Lhoft Catapult FundTech 360°, the shortlist included Marc de Beaucors’ promising Parisian regtech, Finavax, which had just promised insurers that its technology for detecting false documents would enable them to recover €72m euros in Luxembourg and €943m in their international business. This was not enough for the insurers, who were clearly more interested in finding a solution to the problem of compliance.

This article was originally published in .