CLEO LABS raises €1.5 million to integrate compliance at the core of product development

For a long time confined to a validation role at the end of the chain, regulatory compliance is now increasingly being integrated from the earliest stages of product design, alongside engineering and supply chain considerations.

Launching a product across multiple markets requires navigating a fragmented, evolving regulatory environment that is highly dependent on jurisdiction. A seemingly standard product such as a connected bicycle helmet can involve more than a hundred distinct requirements, ranging from material standards at the R&D stage to local certifications, labeling constraints, and customs obligations. This complexity is not a one-off burden but a structural phenomenon, amplified by the proliferation of regulatory frameworks, whether related to the digital product passport or extra-financial reporting requirements such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive.

In this context, compliance is no longer limited to a legal requirement but becomes an operational variable of time-to-market, capable of accelerating or delaying commercialization. It is precisely at this point of friction that Cleo Labs positions its offering. The startup is developing an artificial intelligence platform designed to transform heterogeneous regulatory flows into structured data, directly usable by product and compliance teams.

Its architecture is based on MARIA, a multi-agent system capable of continuously monitoring more than 25,000 regulatory authorities across 106 countries. The objective is not only to aggregate information, but to contextualize it according to a specific product and market, and then extract operational obligations. The platform thus enables the upstream generation of compliance checklists and ensures continuous monitoring of regulatory changes, along with analysis of their impact on operations. Each result is validated by legal experts under a “human-in-the-loop” principle, aimed at maintaining a level of reliability compatible with industrial decision-making.

This hybridization between automation and human validation reflects a core tension within RegTech. The challenge is not merely to produce information, but to make it actionable without transferring excessive legal risk to users. Cleo Labs attempts to reconcile scalability with accountability in a domain where errors can lead to product recalls, financial penalties, or logistical disruptions.

“Our ambition is to transform regulatory compliance, currently perceived as a constraint, into a strategic lever for companies. Thanks to AI, it becomes possible to anticipate rather than endure,” explains Naomie Halioua, co-founder of Cleo Labs. Compliance is thus no longer conceived as a final filter, but as a forward-looking tool integrated into development cycles.

The testimony from Decathlon, already using the solution במסגרת a pilot, further illustrates this shift. “At Decathlon, our challenge is to capture highly precise information within a massive volume of international product regulations, with both legal and technical implications: managing global compliance while supporting our engineers in product development. This is the bridge we are building through the PoC conducted with Cleo: their AI engine acts as an intelligent translator, filtering noise to extract structured data that is directly actionable for our teams and essential to guiding design within our PLM,” explains Philippine Tamic.

The growth of RegTech is no longer driven solely by the needs of the financial sector, but is now expanding into industry, retail, and companies operating across international value chains. The intensification of regulatory production acts as an exogenous driver, making such solutions increasingly indispensable. In this sense, compliance is gradually becoming an infrastructure layer, comparable to what cybersecurity or data management have represented over the past decade.

The announced funding round is part of an early-stage phase. It is led by Larry Berger, with participation from Kima Ventures, Financière Saint-James, and several figures from the tech ecosystem, including Boris Paillard, Ambre Soubiran, Stéphanie Zolesio, and Charles Sutton. The startup also won the regional final of The Pitch by Deel at Station F, securing additional funding and access to the international final in Dubai.

Founded in 2023 by Naomie Halioua, an engineer graduated from École Polytechnique, and Anaëlle Guez, a graduate of Sorbonne and Panthéon-Assas and former Chief Transformation Officer at Havas, Cleo Labs is developing an AI platform dedicated to international product regulatory compliance. The company has raised €1.5 million to accelerate its technological development and commercial expansion, with the ambition of turning compliance into an integrated function within industrial processes.