Daniel Kjellén’s Freda Bet: Fixing the Compliance Drag on Startups

In a Fortune commentary, Daniel Kjellén writes that selling Tink to Visa gave him freedom, but also left him focused on a problem that slowed his first company: compliance. He describes how ideas that once moved quickly began requiring checks across many people and departments as the company scaled.

Kjellén is now CEO and co-founder of Freda, described in the article bio as an agentic system built to map and run a company’s compliance operation across domains and frameworks. His central takeaway for founders: compliance may feel like a brake, but ignoring it can become a bigger drag later.

Kjellén argues that early compliance work can determine whether a startup is ready to enter new markets years later. He points to practical issues such as VAT registration and product compliance as examples of details that can slow expansion if they surface too late.

The article says Tink eventually reached 700 people and 19 markets, with new obligations appearing as the business grew. For startup leaders, the actionable lesson is to treat compliance as part of market-readiness, not as paperwork to revisit only after growth arrives.

Kjellén challenges the stereotype that compliance is mainly a European problem. He writes that Europe may have rules for almost everything, but that clarity can help companies plan from day one.

By contrast, he says America often regulates after the fact, with bottlenecks hidden in case law, state legislatures and long commercial contracts. The practical takeaway: founders expanding across the Atlantic should not rely on regulatory stereotypes; they should map the obligations of each market before committing.

The commentary frames AI as promising but not automatically sufficient for compliance work. Kjellén warns that a chatbot-style or “vibe-coded” compliance system can fall short when obligations depend on company size, sector, markets, customer promises and regulatory context.

He argues that fast-changing businesses create fast-changing compliance requirements, especially as companies deploy AI agents and operate in critical industries. His conclusion is that regulation will become more complicated and more important, making compliance infrastructure a problem worth fixing.