Certo Raises $4M to Automate the $500B Compliance Bottleneck in Beauty and CPG

The regulatory path from a beauty product's formula to a store shelf in 150 countries runs on spreadsheets. Certo just raised $4 million to change that.

The Paris and San Francisco-based startup announced a seed round on May 26, 2026, led by French VC firm Daphni, with participation from Entrepreneurs First, Motier Ventures, and Transpose Platform . Industry advisors Alexandre Godvin and Vincent Delacourt, co-founders of AQM (acquired by Eurofins Scientific), also joined the round .

This isn't a company searching for product-market fit. Certo is already deployed inside global beauty groups, specialty brands, retailers, and regulated CPG companies across Europe and the United States . For a seed-stage compliance startup, that level of enterprise adoption is unusual—and signals how deeply the industry's pain runs.

Why a spreadsheet can't launch a moisturizer in 150 countries

Consumer beauty and CPG brands face a compliance gauntlet: up to 150+ jurisdictions, each with distinct rules on ingredients, formulas, marketing claims, labelling, and packaging . A single product launch can require cross-referencing thousands of line items against regulations that change without warning.

The regulatory pressure is intensifying. New EU regulations targeting microplastics, greenwashing (the Green Claims Directive), packaging waste (PPWR), and allergen classification are layering on complexity that manual workflows were never designed to handle . Yet the process "hasn't changed in decades," according to CEO and co-founder Bastien Deliège-Coste, with most teams still relying on fragmented spreadsheets, PDFs, and siloed document systems .

The platform: Five modules, one proprietary regulatory engine

Certo's platform covers the full product compliance lifecycle through five integrated modules :

• Raw material and ingredient homologation
• Formula compliance checks
• Claims verification
• Artwork and labelling reviews
• Market entry documentation

Each module draws on a proprietary regulatory database that is continuously updated to reflect current regulations across the EU, US, China, South Korea, Japan, and Latin America . Instead of a generic large language model guessing at compliance, Certo uses specialized AI agents trained explicitly on regulatory texts. These agents cross-check products against applicable regulations, internal company standards, and retailer-specific requirements .

Crucially, every finding arrives with detailed reasoning and a regulatory source citation—making the output auditable, not just automated. That traceability is the difference between an AI that suggests and an AI that a compliance officer can defend to a regulator.

Built from the workflow out, not the technology in

Certo was founded in 2023 by Bastien Deliège-Coste (CEO) and Jean Duquenne (CTO) . Their approach was deliberately counter to the "build it and they will come" startup playbook. The founders embedded with regulatory teams to understand the actual work, then built the technology around those realities.

Duquenne described it plainly: "We started with the workflows of regulatory teams—sitting with them, understanding how they actually review products—and built the technology around those realities" .

That workflow-first approach explains why the platform already anchors compliance operations at major beauty and CPG companies despite the company's youth.

Traction and revenue targets

Certo has set a target of $500,000 in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2025 and $2 million by the end of 2026 . While revenue numbers at seed stage should be read as projections rather than guarantees, the company points to its existing enterprise deployments as evidence that the demand is real .

The investor syndicate brings more than capital. Daphni, with deep roots in the European startup ecosystem, is joined by Entrepreneurs First (known for backing founders at the earliest stages), Motier Ventures (the family office of the Houzé family, behind Galeries Lafayette), and Transpose Platform . The advisor bench, including the AQM co-founders, adds domain credibility—Eurofins' 2022 acquisition of AQM confirmed the strategic value of compliance technology in the consumer goods supply chain.

Where the $4 million goes

The company plans to deploy the capital across four priorities :

• Expanding engineering and in-house regulatory teams
• Deepening multi-market regulatory coverage beyond the current six core markets
• Accelerating product development across all five platform modules
• Scaling commercial operations in both Europe and the United States

For an industry where regulatory timelines remain the critical path to market, Certo's bet is that AI agents with auditable reasoning will replace the spreadsheet as the compliance team's primary tool—not because spreadsheets are broken, but because 150 jurisdictions have made them functionally obsolete.