Cardamon: Empowering Financial Firms to Launch Regulated Products 10X Faster

How Did Cardamon Start?

Cardamon, a cutting-edge platform focused on automating regulatory compliance in the financial industry, was founded in 2025 by Areg Nzsdejan and Dmytro Astakhov. The idea behind the platform stemmed from the founders’ direct experience with the challenges of product development in highly regulated financial environments. Both Areg and Dmytro previously worked at Revolut, a prominent financial technology company, where they witnessed firsthand the inefficiencies involved in navigating complex regulations. While they had new products ready to launch, compliance teams faced extensive delays due to the time-consuming and manual nature of compliance processes.

Frustrated with the status quo, Areg and Dmytro realized there was a huge opportunity to revolutionize this space. They decided to tackle the problem by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline compliance tasks. Their goal was to enable financial firms to launch regulated products 10 times faster by automating the compliance process. This led to the creation of Cardamon, an AI-powered platform designed to expedite the transition from regulation to product requirements.

What Problem Does Cardamon Solve?

Financial services companies face the burden of complying with a wide range of complex regulations. This can often lead to significant delays in launching and maintaining financial products. The process of compliance is often manual and time-consuming, requiring compliance officers to sift through thousands of pages of regulations, understand the specific rules, and then map those rules into actionable product requirements. These manual tasks can take up hundreds of hours per year for each compliance officer.

At Revolut, Areg and Dmytro experienced this issue firsthand. Products that were ready for launch often languished in compliance limbo for weeks, as the manual process of regulatory analysis consumed vast amounts of time. The founders were surprised by how inefficient the process was, especially considering that compliance was often taking as long as product development itself. This inefficiency posed a significant challenge for financial companies seeking to innovate and bring new products to market quickly.

How Does Cardamon Address the Problem?

Cardamon provides a solution by automating the entire regulatory compliance process using AI. The platform ingests relevant regulations, interprets them, and applies the necessary requirements to a financial firm’s products—all in a fraction of the time it would take using traditional methods.

The platform’s AI-powered regulatory mapping system works by analyzing every relevant regulation and extracting key information for compliance officers. It evaluates the applicability of each regulation to the firm’s products, identifies specific obligations, determines the potential impacts of those obligations, and assesses associated risks. Furthermore, Cardamon generates controls for the obligations and allows compliance officers to query underlying regulations with specific questions, providing full transparency and control.

What sets Cardamon apart is the ease with which compliance officers can interact with the platform. They can select any regulation they want to map to their firm’s products and immediately begin evaluating its applicability. Additionally, compliance officers have the ability to edit, save, and download mappings as a CSV, making the process even more user-friendly. By automating the tedious aspects of compliance, Cardamon allows compliance teams to focus on higher-value tasks, ultimately accelerating the product launch process.

What Makes Cardamon’s Approach Unique?

Cardamon’s approach is unique because it integrates AI into the regulatory compliance process in a way that drastically reduces the manual effort involved. The platform allows compliance officers to quickly move from the identification of relevant regulations to the creation of specific product requirements, reducing the compliance timeline from weeks to minutes. The use of AI to automate the regulatory mapping process saves companies hundreds of hours annually, ultimately enabling them to launch products faster and enter new markets with greater ease.

Furthermore, Cardamon is designed with flexibility in mind. It supports a wide range of regulations and can be tailored to meet the specific needs of different financial firms. Whether a company is dealing with banking regulations, securities regulations, or any other industry-specific rules, Cardamon can handle it. The platform provides a comprehensive solution that not only automates compliance but also allows for the continuous monitoring of changes in regulations, ensuring that financial firms remain compliant over time.

How Does Cardamon’s AI Work?

Cardamon’s AI technology is at the core of the platform’s ability to streamline compliance processes. The platform uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand and interpret complex regulations. This allows the AI to identify key elements in the regulatory text, such as obligations, risks, and product requirements, and apply them to the specific context of a financial firm.

Once the regulations are ingested, the AI processes the information and creates a detailed mapping of the compliance requirements. This mapping includes not only the applicable regulations but also the specific actions that need to be taken in order to ensure compliance. The AI can also identify potential gaps in compliance and highlight areas where further attention is needed, helping firms stay ahead of any regulatory changes.

In addition to regulatory mapping, Cardamon’s AI also includes features for querying underlying regulations, providing additional insights into specific questions or concerns that compliance officers may have. This level of automation significantly reduces the time and effort required for regulatory analysis and ensures that compliance officers have the information they need to make informed decisions quickly.

Who Are the Founders of Cardamon?

Cardamon was founded by two seasoned professionals, Areg Nzsdejan and Dmytro Astakhov, both of whom have extensive experience in the fintech industry. Prior to founding Cardamon, Areg was a Product Owner at Revolut, where he led the Diversified Assets and Engagement teams. He managed a team of 14 engineers and was responsible for launching several key products, including ETFs, EU stocks, and bonds. His experience in managing complex financial products gave him a deep understanding of the challenges involved in launching compliant products.

Dmytro, on the other hand, served as a Senior Software Engineer at Revolut, where he led the backend engineering efforts for the development of ETFs and EU stock products. Dmytro’s expertise in software development and engineering, combined with Areg’s product management background, made them an ideal team to create a solution that would tackle the inefficiencies they had experienced in the compliance process.

Together, Areg and Dmytro bring a unique blend of technical expertise and product management experience to Cardamon, allowing them to develop a platform that not only addresses a real industry need but also leverages their deep understanding of the challenges faced by financial firms.

What Impact Will Cardamon Have on the Financial Industry?

Cardamon has the potential to significantly transform the way financial firms approach regulatory compliance. By automating the compliance process, the platform not only accelerates the launch of new products but also reduces the risk of regulatory violations. This can help firms expand more quickly into new markets, innovate more freely, and better serve their customers—all while staying compliant with complex and ever-evolving regulations.

The time saved by automating compliance processes can also be reinvested into other areas of the business, such as product development, customer service, and innovation. This can lead to improved operational efficiency and better financial performance for firms that adopt Cardamon’s platform.

Ultimately, Cardamon is poised to make a significant impact on the financial services industry by providing a more efficient, cost-effective, and scalable solution to the challenge of regulatory compliance. As more firms adopt AI-powered solutions like Cardamon, the industry will likely see a shift toward greater automation and efficiency in the compliance process, leading to faster product launches and a more streamlined regulatory environment overall.