Daphni leads $4M seed in Certo to automate global compliance for beauty and CPG brands — TFN

Paris-based AI startup Certo has raised a $4 million seed round led by Daphni, with participation from Entrepreneurs First, Motier Ventures, and Transpose Platform. The company is building an end-to-end compliance platform to help consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands navigate the fast-changing web of regulations across global markets—starting with beauty, personal care, and dietary supplements, and expanding into food and beverage.

Why it matters

Consumer brands that sell internationally must comply with rules across up to 150 countries. Each market can have unique requirements governing ingredients, formulas, marketing claims, labeling, packaging, and documentation. Despite this complexity, many regulatory teams still rely on manual cross-checks, scattered spreadsheets, and siloed files—processes that are slow, error-prone, and hard to audit.

“A lot of very smart people are doing annual and repetitive work. We built Certo because regulatory teams are buried under growing requirements with no tools designed for their actual workflows,” said co-founder and CEO Bastien Deliège-Coste.

What Certo does

Certo’s platform automates the full compliance journey with specialized AI agents designed for specific tasks, rather than generic large language models reading regulatory text. The platform currently offers five core modules:

• Raw material and ingredient approval
• Formula and product compliance checks
• Claims verification
• Artwork and labeling review
• Market-entry documentation generation

Every compliance finding is traceable down to the data source and reasoning path. “The traceability of every finding is what makes it usable in a regulated environment,” Deliège-Coste noted, highlighting auditability as a core design principle.

How it stands out

While several AI tools target regulatory workflows, Certo emphasizes three moats that go beyond model choice:

• A continuously expanding, structured regulatory database tailored to CPG categories
• In-house regulatory expertise embedded in product design and service delivery
• An enterprise-first, managed-services approach that customizes workflows for each customer, rather than a one-size-fits-all self-serve product

Deliège-Coste believes managed services will define the next generation of compliance technology, enabling companies to offload repetitive tasks while retaining transparent, auditable outputs.

Investor perspective

“Every consumer product sold internationally goes through a compliance process that hasn’t changed in twenty years: manual checks, scattered PDFs, expensive consultants. Whether it’s cosmetics, food, or dietary supplements, the pain is the same. Certo replaces that with AI agents that verify products against live regulations, with auditable reasoning across every ingredient and every geography,” said Daphni partners Briac Lescure and Jonas Simonin.

Team and hiring

Certo’s six-person team spans France, Switzerland, and the United States. The company expects to grow headcount with regulatory specialists as it scales its database and managed services. Given that regulatory affairs in personal and home care skew female industry-wide, the founders anticipate a more gender-balanced team as they expand.

Use of funds and roadmap

The seed round will fuel three priorities:

• Hiring regulatory experts to deepen the database and expand managed services
• Accelerating commercial growth in the US, where the company already serves customers and sees its largest opportunity
• Extending beyond personal care and supplements into food and beverage, where product development is underway

Traction and targets

Certo has not disclosed customer names or current ARR. Internally, the company is targeting $500,000 in ARR by the end of 2025 and $2 million by 2027.

The bottom line

Global compliance is a high-stakes, high-friction function for CPG brands. By combining specialized AI agents, an auditable knowledge base, and enterprise-grade services, Certo aims to compress regulatory timelines, reduce risk, and help teams ship products to new markets with confidence. With fresh capital and a US-focused go-to-market push, the startup is positioning itself as the compliance co-pilot for modern beauty and CPG companies.