Making the worst software in finance worth wanting
Ask most people at a financial firm about their compliance software and you get a sigh. Dave Feldman heard that sigh and decided it was a market. As co-founder and CEO of Greenboard, he is building what he calls an operating system for financial compliance - one platform meant to replace the four or five aging tools that most firms limp along with today. The pitch is blunt: compliance does not have to feel like punishment.
Greenboard, founded in 2023 and based in New York, sits in a corner of software that rarely gets glossy attention. Its customers are registered investment advisers, broker-dealers, and other regulated financial institutions - businesses that must satisfy the SEC and a moving target of rules, but that get no revenue from doing so. Feldman is direct about the tension. "At the end of the day, it is really hard for a part of your business that doesn't make any money to spend infinite money on software solutions," he has said. That single sentence explains why the category has been starved of good products for decades, and why he thinks there is an opening.
The company has moved quickly for such an unglamorous space. In May 2026 Greenboard announced $20 million in total funding, including a previously undisclosed $15.5 million Series A led by Base10 Partners, the same firm that had backed its $4.5 million seed round. More than 500 financial institutions now run their compliance programs on the platform, and Feldman cites customer retention above 99 percent. Greenboard came up through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, and early press described the ambition in shorthand the startup world understands: "Rippling for financial compliance and operations."
A ChatGPT moment, read differently
The idea took shape at the end of 2022, when ChatGPT went viral and every founder in tech started asking what AI could do for them. Feldman, then working in product at Guideline - the retirement-plan company later acquired by Gusto - had spent enough time near financial recordkeeping to know how bad the surrounding tools were. He describes compliance software as something that "kind of stinks." Where others saw a chatbot, he saw a chance to give a whole neglected category a different feel: software that could read regulations, flag risk, and guide non-experts through work that used to require a specialist for every step.
He is careful, though, about where the machine stops. Greenboard's design is what Feldman calls "expert in the loop" - AI handles routine, high-volume work while human compliance professionals review the output and make the judgment calls. "There are all these very specific compliance requirements around books and records that you're not going to be able to vibe code," he has said. The company's stated philosophy is to amplify each compliance officer rather than replace them, on the view that in subjective, high-stakes work, human judgment stays valuable no matter how good the models get.
There are all these very specific compliance requirements around books and records that you're not going to be able to vibe code.
When you have 3, 4 or 5 fragmented compliance systems that all look and feel like they were built 20 years ago, it undermines your compliance culture.
From chemical engineering to a compliance OS
Feldman's path into finance was not a straight line. A Texan by origin, he studied chemical and biomolecular engineering as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University, then stayed on for a master's in computer science. It was there that he met Ed Schembor, his co-founder and Greenboard's technical lead, who went on to build product and engineering systems at Amazon before the two reunited to start a company. Between school and Greenboard, Feldman led Hive AI's joint venture with Bain & Company, then joined Guideline, where he helped build core systems including its financial recordkeeping engine.
That mix - hard-science training, machine-learning work, and time inside the plumbing of a regulated financial product - is unusual, and it shows in how he talks about the problem. He frames fragmented tooling not as an inconvenience but as a cultural failure. When teams have to learn several clunky systems, only the specialists ever get comfortable, and everyone else disengages. Greenboard's answer is to fold education and ease-of-use into one interface so that, as he puts it, more of a firm can become a compliance champion rather than leaving it to a small back-office few.
The bigger bet
What keeps Feldman interesting is that he is not selling a modest productivity gain. The company's internal north star, described on its own site, is to make compliance software so good that not using Greenboard would be "tantamount to negligence in vendor selection." His personal ambition runs further still: he talks about a world where regulation stops acting as a brake on legitimate business at all. If software can absorb the friction of staying compliant, then firms can move faster without cutting corners - and, in his telling, that is not just a better product but a small contribution to how the economy works.
For now the work is more grounded. Greenboard is expanding its footprint among registered investment advisers and broker-dealers, layering in features like conversational compliance workflows and AI-driven risk detection, and leaning on the retention numbers that let a young company argue it has found real product-market fit. Base10's decision to lead both the seed and the Series A is the kind of signal investors read closely: the people who know the company best chose to double down.
Feldman keeps his own profile low. He lists hiking, sailing, and downhill skiing among the things he does away from the desk, and he tends to describe Greenboard in the plain language of a builder rather than the vocabulary of a pitch deck. That understatement fits the category. Compliance is not glamorous, the tools have been bad for a long time, and the customer is skeptical by nature. Feldman seems to think those are exactly the conditions in which a genuinely good product can win - quietly, one retained firm at a time.
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