The Fintech founders who built one of Europe’s open banking platforms Tink have stepped back into the startup arena with a very different problem in mind: the constant work of staying compliant.
Daniel Kjellén and Fredrik Hedberg founded Stockholm-based Tink in 2012 and spent a decade turning it into a widely used layer of financial infrastructure.
Through a single set of interfaces, banks, fintechs and merchants could pull account data, move money and build new products on top of connections spanning thousands of institutions. Visa agreed to buy the company in 2021 and completed the takeover in 2022, in a deal reported at roughly €1.8 billion to more than $2 billion depending on the exchange rate used at the time.
The founders stayed on after the sale—Kjellén as chief executive and Hedberg as chief technology officer—before leaving to start something new.
That company is Freda.
After more than a year in stealth, it came out of hiding on 23 September 2026 as an “agentic” compliance platform: software meant not only to list rules, but to interpret them and carry out the work of meeting them.
Adam Ivarsson, a former Tink global vice president, is part of the founding group.
Reports describe the venture as self-funded, with a small team of around 20 rather than the hundreds Tink employed at scale.
The founders say the idea came from lived experience.
While Tink grew into a company of several hundred people under multiple regulators, they watched legal and compliance processes slow product work far beyond the specialist teams responsible for it.
Timelines that should have taken weeks stretched into months or years.
Other parts of the business had modern tools. Compliance, they argue, did not.
Generic checklists described what a typical firm in a category should do; they rarely mapped the exact obligations of one company, and they almost never executed the follow-through across vendors, contracts, systems and people.
Freda’s pitch is that artificial intelligence finally makes that last step possible.
The system ingests large volumes of laws, standards and local provisions, converts them into machine-readable logic, and determines what applies to a given organisation.
It then builds a tailored programme and uses agents to run workflows inside the tools a company already uses—adding a vendor, updating a risk register, attaching evidence, scanning for regulatory change.
Hedberg has framed the architecture as two layers working together: a regulatory engine plus a knowledge graph of the client’s own operations.
Without both, he says, you get an assistant that talks about compliance rather than a system that performs it.
The company positions this as especially relevant in Europe, where overlapping regimes—from data protection and operational resilience to AI, payments and sustainability reporting—have multiplied the cost of doing business.
Whether or not software can reliably take on work that still carries legal and audit risk will be the test. For now, the Tink alumni are betting that the bottleneck they could not remove last time is the product worth building next.