Portfolio
Tessera Labs
AI-powered compliance infrastructure for financial services teams. Tessera rebuilds the trust layer between regulated institutions and their obligations.
B2B SAAS
Series A
$10M
Fund Raised
2022
First Check
40+
Enterprise Clients
About
Built to solve a problem regulators keep making harder.
Tessera started with a single observation: compliance teams at regulated financial institutions were spending 60% of their time on documentation that generated no insight, only liability. The founders had lived this problem across four banks and three continents. They did not go looking for a VC firm. They went looking for someone who understood the problem before they had to explain it.
NorthBridge was the first call they made. We had been building conviction in AI-native compliance infrastructure for 18 months before Tessera existed. That alignment meant we could move in 10 days from first meeting to term sheet.
Most funds want to see the metrics before they move. NorthBridge committed to the thesis before we had revenue, before we had the full team, and before the market had a name for what we were building. That is a different kind of partner.
James Okafor
Why We Invested
What We Saw Before Everyone Else Did
The compliance technology market was full of workflow tools dressed up as infrastructure. Tessera was different. They were rebuilding the evidence layer from first principles, not wrapping a spreadsheet in a SaaS UI. That distinction matters enormously when regulators increase their scrutiny.
The founders had the rare combination of deep domain knowledge and product instinct. They understood the problem at the level of a practitioner and could translate it into a system architecture no one else had attempted. That is the combination we back.
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