After selling open-banking platform Tink to Visa for $2 billion in 2022, co-founder and former CEO Daniel Kjellén could have stepped away from entrepreneurship. Instead, in 2026 he committed personal capital to launch Freda, a compliance technology company focused on the regulatory challenges businesses face as they expand across markets.
Kjellén says the decision was partly shaped by his experience at Tink. In the company’s early days, he and co-founder Fredrik could discuss an idea in a taxi and release a product within a week. After Visa acquired Tink and the team grew, decisions that had once been made quickly required reviews across multiple departments and larger groups of employees. Product development and commercial execution slowed as a result.
Tink grew to 700 employees across 19 markets
Kjellén does not dispute the need for compliance. He describes it as a foundation of sound business and social systems, but says the associated processes can limit a technology company’s ability to experiment as it grows. By the time Tink had about 700 employees and operated in 19 markets, the company was dealing with new obligations almost every day. Each requirement often built on thousands of checks that had already been completed.
For a newly established company, entering a new market can be delayed by tasks such as VAT registration, data-protection requirements and product compliance. In some cases, a business may only discover halfway through an expansion that a product promised across several markets does not meet local rules. That can affect both revenue planning and customer delivery.
The US has its own compliance maze
Kjellén has also revisited the differences between the European and US regulatory environments. Europe is often viewed as a highly regulated region, but its rules are generally more explicit, allowing companies to plan in advance and consult public guidance on requirements such as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.
In the United States, requirements are spread across case law, legislation in all 50 states and hundreds of pages of commercial contracts. A company may only discover after entering the market that states take different approaches to data, consumer rights or commercial arrangements. The absence of a single legal pathway does not necessarily reduce compliance costs; it can instead push companies to spend more on contract reviews, disputes and legal advice.
European companies entering the US therefore cannot simply treat it as a market where they can expand first and address regulation later. US companies entering Europe may also find that the regulatory framework is not as difficult to manage as expected. In both cases, much of the cost comes from failing to clarify applicable requirements before expansion begins.
Freda is applying AI to specific compliance workflows
Freda emerged from stealth in September 2026. The company describes its product as an intelligent agent system designed to map and operate an organisation’s end-to-end compliance processes across different industries and regulatory frameworks. Kjellén argues that many companies are experimenting with generative AI for compliance, but simply pasting documents into a chatbot or rapidly coding a basic system does not address the operational problem.
Compliance is not a single task. It involves the processes a company must perform every day and depends on its size, industry, markets, product changes and previous commitments to customers and regulators. Fast-growing technology companies may change their products, business models and target markets daily. Whether an AI system produces useful results depends heavily on whether it understands that wider context.
Kjellén says many businesses are deploying AI agents at scale, even though those systems may not have read the company’s internal policies or be aware of a recent ruling by a local court. In highly regulated sectors such as finance and healthcare, the interaction between regulatory requirements and corporate responsibility can become even more complex. Freda’s commercial opportunity is built around helping companies track those changes continuously, rather than producing a one-off compliance document.
Freda has not disclosed its customer count, funding or commercial revenue. What is clear is that Kjellén has chosen to put the proceeds from the Tink sale into a problem he believes remains unresolved, rather than investing only in other founders. The new company will ultimately be tested by whether it can reduce manual coordination in real-world, multi-market operations and help businesses identify specific regulatory requirements earlier.