We’re delighted to share that we’ve invested in Complir’s $11m Seed round, led by General Catalyst, marking our second investment in Denmark this year.

Here’s why we were excited to back Gustav, Tine and Marc on their mission to reduce the cost, time and complexity of product compliance for retailers and brands globally.

Regulation is good in theory, but a nightmare in practice.

Europe is creating one of the most ambitious product safety and sustainability regulatory frameworks.

Over the past decade, Europe has led the world in setting the standards for what can safely and responsibly be sold to consumers. The General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR), the incoming Digital Product Passport, REACH, toy safety and cosmetics rules, packaging law, and so on. Together they form a comprehensive consumer- and environmental-protection regime. We think that’s fundamentally positive - safe products for consumers and the planet has to be a good thing in the long-run for all of us.

However, the rulebook has grown so complex that staying on top of it is a growing operational headache for any company that makes or sells physical products. The process is costly and time-consuming, the pace of new product launches slows and the fines for non-compliance are steep: in 2026, the European Commission issued a landmark €200m fine against a major marketplace over unsafe products.

Rules are only effective if they can actually be followed and the system is coming under increasing pressure. That’s where Complir comes in.

Complir is building the technology infrastructure that makes the rulebook workable at scale.

Complir is an AI platform helping global retailers and brands automate product compliance including risk assessments, labeling, testing, and documentation. Complir monitors regulatory and compliance requirements and changes down to the individual SKU, automatically reassessing affected products and tracing every flag back to its source.

Working with Complir, Compliance teams can replace spreadsheets and consultants with one connected system of record: cutting repetitive manual work by up to 90%, speeding up time to market, and saving millions in operational and compliance costs.

For years there was simply no good way to solve this problem at scale.

The body of regulation is too large, too fragmented and too fast-changing for any individual or software tool to keep up with. AI changes that.

The good thing about regulations is that they are written down in excruciating detail: codified in a way that LLMs love. AI can read, structure and apply this sprawling, constantly-shifting web of rules in near real-time, in a way that humans simply cannot. This technology inflection point creates a non-linear jump in value and capability, in the context of a world becoming increasingly complex. The timing is perfect.

Market opportunity is necessary, but not sufficient. Who captures that opportunity, and why?

The answer, in our view, is a European company generally - and Complir specifically.

For all its charms, Europe is synonymous with complexity and fragmentation: 25+ countries, 25+ languages, and a sophisticated (and complicated) web of rules. Domestic markets are smaller than the US, so retailers and brands have to look internationally more often. That only compounds the problem: adding new languages, rules and cultural contexts to deal with. We believe a European company in close proximity to the customers for whom this is a massive and present problem is best placed to tackle it.

As for Complir specifically, there were a few things that stood out for us.

First, and most importantly, the team. Gustav, Tine and Marc bring complementary skills with common obsession around solving this problem. Their backgrounds across AI-native tech (including Legora, an AI-native decacorn), product and technology combined with passion and intensity make them well-placed to build a category defining company.

Second, they proved it. Working closely with development partner Flying Tiger, they built a market-leading product capable of solving extraordinary complexity: thousands of products across tens of markets globally. Since that first contract, the team has continued to land major enterprise customers across multiple categories, proving the scale of the problem and the applicability of Complir’s solution.

Finally, the ambition. We bought into the team’s vision that what begins as AI-enabled compliance software has the potential to become critical technology infrastructure for retailers and brands across the world. The applicability of AI and other new technologies to unlock opportunity across the compliance space in fundamentally different ways is massive, and we believe Complir will be front and centre of capturing the opportunity.

We're excited to work closely with Gustav and the Complir team to bring True’s sector-specialist expertise and network to support the long-term mission, including opening doors to our network of corporate partners and retailers, many of whom are wrestling with GPSR, the Digital Product Passport and whatever comes next.

If you’re facing this problem yourself and/or are keen to hear more about Complir and why we backed them, please get in touch at vc@true.global.

Product compliance has become an increasingly complex and expensive challenge for retailers and brands across Europe's fragmented regulatory landscape. Yet the tools to keep pace with the sheer volume and complexity of the rules simply haven't existed. That is exactly the gap that Complir are closing and why we at True are excited to back the company. 

Why We Invested in Complir 

After more than decade of backing companies across consumer (b2c) and retail (b2b), here's our work-in-progress answer to the question we get asked most.

We get asked a version of the same question a lot: 

"What do you actually look for in a founder?"

It’s difficult to have a rigid set of rules or a checklist – just like hiring, there is subjectivity in understanding people and human behaviour.

However, we believe it’s important to have a set of guiding principles, as it helps us benchmark the ~3,000 Founders a year that we meet.

We’ve pulled together a work-in-progress version of those opinions. As always, we'd love to know if you think we’ve missed something critical.

The founders who build category-defining companies aren't primarily motivated by money. That might sound counterintuitive -venture capital exists to generate financial returns, after all - but the evidence is consistent: the best outcomes come from founders who are driven by something bigger than the exit.

 they are making it their life’s work to build this company.

Someone with a long-term orientation - one who thinks in years and decades, not funding rounds.

It's the kind of conviction in the mission that will attract great early employees, wins early customers, and sustains a team through the inevitable hard chapters, when a mercenary might have already moved on.

Paul Graham put it well: missionaries build products they'd want to exist in the world regardless. Mercenaries build products they think will sell.

Closely related - but distinct - from the missionary trait is how deeply a founder understands the specific problem they're solving. The ones who build enduring companies aren't solving problems they've read about in a market report. They're solving problems they've 

, or that they've watched others struggle with up close, for long enough to understand the nuance that outsiders miss.

We're looking for founders who have developed a genuinely differentiated, first-principles view of their problem space. Do they light up talking about the problem? Do they know things about their customer that no survey could reveal? Can they explain not just 

Company-building is hard. The journey from conception to meaningful scale is defined by rejection, setbacks, and an almost relentless requirement to hold things together when everything seems to be going wrong simultaneously. The odds are stacked against you from day one.

Founders who navigate that journey well share a specific type of resilience: not the capacity to absorb pain passively, but an active, almost stubborn refusal to accept "no" as a final answer. The best ones are comfortable being uncomfortable - they've chosen to spend their professional lives in a state of managed uncertainty, and they've found a way to thrive in it.

We look for founders who have run through walls and experienced real adversity (not necessarily in business).

In early-stage company building, the rate of learning matters as much as anything else. The founders who pull ahead aren't always the ones who started with the best idea — they're the ones who learned the fastest, iterated quickest, and held themselves and their teams to standards that most people would find uncomfortable.

We look for founders with an ingrained bias for action: people who default to doing rather than deliberating, who ship and learn rather than planning to perfection. It means having the confidence to move before everything is certain, and the discipline to extract learning from every move you make.

The intensity piece is equally important. The best founders we've backed hold themselves and their teams to genuinely high expectations - not in a way that burns people out, but in a way that ensures everyone is moving the company forward with a winning mindset. They create an environment where everyone has clarity of expectations and how high the bar is, because 

The best founders we've backed share something that's harder to name but unmistakable in person: a deep, almost visceral desire to win - and an equally visceral reaction to losing.

This often comes with what people call a "chip on their shoulder": a point to prove, a slight to avenge, an underestimation to correct. Some of the most successful founders in our portfolio were people who had been told their idea wouldn't work, their market was too small, or they weren't the right person to go after it. That external scepticism, internalised as fuel rather than doubt, can be extraordinarily powerful.

We're looking for a genuine obsession with being the best at what they do: an intolerance for mediocre output, a relentless focus on beating the alternatives in their customer's life (whether that's a competitor, a spreadsheet, or doing nothing), and the hunger to keep raising the bar even when things are going well.

Selling is a non-negotiable skill that founders need at every stage of company-building. You're selling your vision to investors, employees, customers, and potentially a eventual buyer. The best founders are doing all of this simultaneously, and doing it well, from the very beginning.

Storytelling is a big part of selling that’s often underrated. The best founders we've backed can take a complex problem space and make it immediately, viscerally understandable to someone who has never thought about it before. They have a gift for the right analogy, the right anecdote, the right moment of specificity that makes an abstract opportunity feel real and urgent.

The listening piece is equally important, and often missing. The founders who sell best are they the ones who pay enough attention to know exactly which version of the story to tell, and adjust in real time based on what they're hearing.

Why Consumer Is Its Own Category - and What We Look for Specifically

Everything above applies to every founder we back. But here's what we specifically look for in consumer founders:

Intuition for where consumer behaviour is going, not just where it is.

 We want to back founders who see inflection points before they're consensus. The best consumer founders are typically six months to two years ahead of a trend, in a way they can articulate clearly.

Product genius paired with genuine human empathy.

 There's a meaningful difference between a good product and one people 

. Love shows up in the data: word-of-mouth referrals, retention curves, NPS scores. The best consumer founders pair product talent with deep human insight — because product genius without empathy produces technically impressive things that nobody uses.

 Consumer is a social category. People buy things, use apps, and subscribe to services in the context of their identities and communities. The best consumer founders build community into the product architecture from the start, as a structural element that drives down CAC, increases LTV, and creates the emotional moat that contributes to defensibility. The question we ask: 

"Tell us about your most passionate users. What do they have in common? How do they talk about you to their friends?"

 In consumer, retention earned through genuine product love is fundamentally different from retention earned through friction or lock-in. If a founder's retention strategy relies on making it annoying to cancel, that's a warning sign. If it relies on the product being irreplaceable in someone's daily life, that's what we want to back.

If you're building something in consumer or retail tech - and you think you’d be a good fit with us - we'd love to hear from you.

We invest at the earliest stages - pre-seed/seed, across consumer software, consumer services, retail tech, and B2B tools for the consumer & retail ecosystem. We bring sector expertise, a deep network across the global consumer and retail landscape, and a genuine interest in building something alongside you for the long term.

. And if you disagree with anything above, tell us where we're wrong!

What makes a great founder? In this blog we explore answers to the question we get asked the most. 

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