Tink Founders Launch Freda: The First Agentic Operating System for Global Compliance

The founding team behind open banking pioneer Tink has launched Freda, an agentic compliance platform designed to automate complex regulatory obligations through machine-readable logic. For fintech professionals, this represents a move to eliminate the "compliance tax" that frequently delays product launches and complicates cross-border expansion for high-growth financial institutions.

What was announced

Freda emerged from stealth on 23 September 2026 in Stockholm, led by CEO Daniel Kjellén and CTO Fredrik Hedberg. The venture is intentionally self-funded, following a year of development focused on building a proprietary agentic knowledge base and recruiting a team of specialized compliance engineers. The platform is designed to transform static global regulations into a dynamic, machine-readable model that determines specific obligations for any given company.

The technology is built upon three core pillars. First, a regulatory engine harvests hundreds of millions of laws and local provisions, converting them into structured logic. Second, a company knowledge graph connects to a business's internal systems to maintain a live model of its products, licenses, and active geographies. Finally, an execution layer allows both AI agents and human operators to act on this data. Unlike general-purpose language models, Freda grounds its output in these structured data models to ensure every action is traceable to a specific regulatory source.

The launch addresses a significant economic drain; citing OECD data, the founders noted that 3.9% of European employment is currently dedicated to compliance tasks, which is more than double the 1.7% of the workforce engaged in research and development. Freda aims to provide continuous compliance rather than checkpoint-based monitoring, allowing businesses to scale across jurisdictions without the traditional months-long delays associated with manual regulatory mapping.

"Freda is the tool we wish we'd had when scaling Tink. High-trust organisations can't run compliance on a general-purpose model that knows a little about everything and nothing about them. We built Freda on two things: a regulatory engine and a knowledge graph of each client's organisation, built from the systems they already run on. Every action our agents take is grounded in both. That is the difference between an AI assistant that talks about compliance and a system that does it."

Fredrik Hedberg, co-founder and CTO of Freda.

The companies involved

Freda is the second major venture for its founding trio, who previously built Tink into one of Europe’s most successful fintech stories. Daniel Kjellén and Fredrik Hedberg are joined by co-founder Adam Ivarsson, who serves as Freda’s CPO/COO and was formerly the global VP at Tink. The team’s background is rooted in large-scale financial infrastructure; at Tink, they developed the open banking framework that connected more than 3,400 banks across 18 different markets. This infrastructure was instrumental in transitioning European financial services from closed to open systems.

Tink’s market dominance led to its acquisition by Visa in 2022 for $2.2 billion, marking one of the largest fintech exits in European history. At the time of the sale, Tink employed nearly 1,000 people and was navigating the increasingly intricate regulatory landscape that Freda now seeks to automate. While Freda is a new entrant in the regtech space, its leadership brings over a decade of experience in managing the friction between rapid technological innovation and rigid regulatory requirements within the European Union and beyond.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has followed the evolution of the founders' previous venture extensively, with 74 stories documenting Tink’s growth and its eventual integration into the Visa ecosystem. In late 2025, we covered how the First Visa A2A Transaction Completed in the UK With Partners Kroo Bank, Utilita and Tink, showcasing the practical application of their infrastructure. We also reported on the platform's expansion as Splitwise Expands Pay by Bank Across France, Germany, and Austria With Tink, highlighting the cross-border capabilities the team is now applying to compliance. Other significant coverage includes Zing Launches Automatic and One Tap Top-Ups for All Members using Tink’s technology, and insights into the retail sector where Tink Reveals Three in Four High End Merchants Optimistic About Peak Season.

What this means

The launch of Freda signals a shift in the regtech market from passive "dashboards" to active "agents." For years, compliance has been the final manual bottleneck in fintech, often surviving on spreadsheets and legal memos while every other part of the stack was automated. By moving toward machine-readable logic, the industry is entering an era where regulatory adherence is treated as code rather than a matter of human interpretation. This puts significant pressure on traditional consultancy-led compliance firms. However, it also raises critical questions for the sector regarding liability: as agents take over execution, the industry must determine where the legal responsibility lies when an automated system misinterprets a local provision.