AI agents in financial services are increasing productivity by handling thousands of customer interactions every day, but manual compliance reviews are unable to scale with increased regulatory oversight. Alinia, a startup that builds compliance tools for AI systems, addresses this issue by building real-time audits, guardrails, and risk controls into AI workflows, ensuring compliance across markets through tools like multilingual Guard models.
Ariadna Font Llitjós, co-founder and CEO of Alinia, said, “As global spending on generative AI reaches $644 billion by 2025 (Gartner), adoption in regulated industries is hitting compliance walls. Alinia is building a secure gateway that provides compliance and business teams with unified visibility and control across the enterprise.”
Today, the New York and Barcelona-based startup raised $7.5 million in seed funding led by Mouro Capital with participation from Raise Ventures, Speedinvest, and Precursor Ventures.
Building a compliance backbone for high-stakes AI agents
Founded by Ariadna Font Llitjós and Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis, who previously worked at Twitter, IBM, Hugging Face, and Sony AI, Alinia is building an infrastructure that allows organizations to audit and manage AI systems at scale.
Ariadna speaks TFN“When we launched Alinia, there was pretty much agreement among people that the market for controlling and constraining genAI applications would be something we would have to worry about at some point in the future. We knew it was a little premature, with EU AI legislation still being drafted, but we also knew it was coming sooner than many thought. Before trying to raise our first funding, we spoke to over 100 companies to find out how they were thinking about AI and what they were already doing. We spent a lot of time understanding how we use AI, not just reading reports about it, but doing our own direct market research.”
Alinia’s Guardrails API provides real-time enforcement using MiFID2-compliant Investment Guard and a multilingual Hallucination Detector that can be tailored to your risk thresholds. Unlike general guardrails, USP includes precise capabilities for jurisdiction-specific violations such as EU Delegated Regulation 2017/565, as well as an upcoming compliance controller for custom regulations.
Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis, co-founder and chief operating officer, added: “General guardrails will miss subtle violations tied to the business realities of a particular jurisdiction. Detecting and restricting certain types of AI output, such as investment advice under EU Delegated Regulation 2017/565 and ESMA guidelines, requires precise and contextual understanding.”
Competitors such as Compliance.ai (regulatory monitoring), Theta Lake (telecom compliance), and Napier AI (general AI compliance) lack Alinia’s focus on real-time AI agent output in finance.
Alinia is already deployed at Santander Group, supporting the bank’s AI governance framework. It is also used by Origin Financial, whose AI financial advisor relies on Alinia for backend control.
What about diversity? How do you see women thriving in the tech industry?
“38.5% of our team is made up of women, and most of them are members of our technical team,” Ariadna said.
On being a woman in the tech industry, she adds: “After a long career in AI research and technology, this was a natural next step for me.
I think we need you as women entering the AI and technology fields. We need diverse experiences and voices in technology, especially in AI. However, gender is one of many sources of diversity. Age, personal and professional experience, place of origin, language are others.
This is what I would say to women who are thinking about becoming founders. “You’re not getting any younger.” So if you have the ambition and energy and can go without pay for a few months, go for it. Surround yourself with a great team and experienced advisors. You are guaranteed to learn a lot, but as long as you remember to enjoy the journey, it will be well worth it. “But make sure you’re prepared to suffer and go through very difficult times. Make sure you’re OK with only what you learned at the end remaining. Statistically, that’s the most likely outcome.”
It’s clear the world needs more women and more female founders in technology. Therefore, my recommendation is that if they have ambition, they should strive to overcome their fears. What helped me make the call was thinking about all the young men and many women who would be founders who were much less experienced than me. ”
What’s next?
Alinia is expanding its AI engineering, research, sales, and customer success teams across Europe and the United States to meet accelerating enterprise demand. Ariadna concluded, “We want Alinia to become the compliance infrastructure for AI agents. The next three years will be key as we continue to develop our unique compliance models and deploy the technology at scale under the control of human experts.”
“Innovation cannot scale without trust,” said Manuel Silva Martínez, general partner at Mouro Capital. “AI cannot transform the financial services industry unless it is deployed at scale in a responsible, accountable, and auditable manner. The future of AI is unimaginable without the Alinia team’s contributions to the maturation of the AI industry.”
Charles Hudson, GP at Precursor Ventures, said, “We backed Ariadna and Carlos because they are building for the reality that businesses face today. AI exists, but trust and control does not. Alinia’s vision is timely and essential.”
