Shauli Zacks
Published on: August 27, 2025
SafetyDetectives recently interviewed Cristian Gherhes, Founder and CEO of Lexverify, to learn how his company is transforming compliance through AI-powered risk prevention. With a background in social science and years of experience leading large-scale digital transformation projects, Cristian brings a unique perspective to the world of legal and compliance technology. In this conversation, he shared what inspired him to start Lexverify, how its real-time compliance assistant works, and why proactive compliance will soon be as essential as spellcheck.
Can you introduce yourself and talk about what led you to start Lexverify?
My path to becoming an entrepreneur is a little different than others’. I am a social scientist by background, so I started my career as an academic, researching everything from economic development to technological development and understanding human behaviour in different contexts. In hindsight, it was a relatively short career but one that led to where I am today. During my time in academia, I led on multi-million-pound UK government-funded projects focused on AI adoption and digital transformation in medium and large enterprises. Working with top professional services firms, I helped foster AI adoption and advance Next Generation Professional Services in the UK. All this experience gave me a great insight into human behaviour, what shapes it, what drives us, and what motivates us.
At the end of 2020, I had my ‘eureka’ moment and came up with the idea for Lexverify. I looked at the never-ending stream of corporate scandals, almost all of which involved some form of electronic communication—be it an email, a message, or a document—proving wrongdoing. I thought ‘why don’t we just tell people they’re about to make a mistake before they make it? Surely, it’s better to prevent bad things from happening than fighting lawsuits and undergoing regulatory investigations.’ We have spell checkers for grammar check but nothing for ensuring compliant communications. So, I put all my knowledge and experience into practice and started Lexverify with a simple and clear vision: to make risk prevention as easy as spellchecking.
What’s the core problem Lexverify is solving, and what makes your platform stand out?
Whether on Outlook or Teams, nowadays we are in constant dialogue with colleagues, customers, and vendors. Electronic communication has evolved to the point where we cannot imagine working without it. It’s transformed the way we work, it’s efficient, and it’s convenient, but with all this great convenience also comes great potential liability from non-compliant communications.
Employees are generally relied upon to observe corporate policies in their day-to-day communications. Yet they typically receive little support beyond any initial training on compliant communication and are held responsible when things go wrong. All it takes is one mishap, one mistake, or one bad actor to put an organisation at risk and trigger regulatory investigations or lawsuits. These, in turn, cause significant financial loss and reputational damage.
The media abounds with corporate misbehaviour stories involving regulatory investigations or lawsuits, with electronic communications often providing core evidence of wrongdoing. These cost companies millions per year, causing significant financial loss and reputational damage.
Despite ever increasing reliance on electronic communications, employees typically receive little support beyond statutory training. They are simply relied upon to observe myriad policies in their day-to-day work. And yet, despite the focus and millions of dollars spent globally on compliance training, our data demonstrates that still 1 in 20 emails contains a potential compliance breach.
Lexverify helps ensure all your electronic communications are compliant; every email, every message, every time. Our AI-powered assistant makes risk prevention as easy as spell checking. For Risk & Compliance and Legal teams, Lexverify’s admin dashboard provides real-time visibility of conduct risk, enabling them to proactively manage risk, better allocate training budgets, and therefore significantly improve their organisation’s compliance posture.
Lexverify claims to make “risk prevention as easy as spell‑checking.” How does your AI actually work under the hood?
Leveraging advanced AI technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), our compliance assistant identifies and flags potential legal, compliance, and cyber risks in real time, as they are being typed—just like a spell checker flags grammar mistakes. Lexverify nudges the user to consider the potential issue being flagged and to take corrective action if needed, before an email is sent.
The real-time nature of the platform not only helps users avoid potential compliance risks, but it continually reinforces compliance training and avoids the frustrations of having to return to ‘sent’ emails flagged for possible compliance breaches after having pressed the send button. This empowers proactive compliance, at scale.In hybrid and remote work setups, communication channels multiply. How does Lexverify integrate across platforms like Teams and Outlook without disrupting workflows?
Lexverify integrates natively with Microsoft 365 applications—Outlook and Teams at the moment—and is deployable in minutes. Our add-ins work seamlessly across operating systems, platforms, and the Microsoft 365 environment.
Our Outlook Add-in, for example, can be used in both ‘live’ and ‘background’ modes, meaning that users have the flexibility to see potential risks in the add-in panel as they’re typing an email, or have potential risks flagged upon clicking the ‘send’ button. Lexverify ensures a seamless workflow, only nudging users when there is a potential risk that needs to be considered.
What kind of compliance and legal risks is Lexverify most effective at catching—especially in sectors like finance and pharma?
Our solutions cover key risk areas such as Competition Law, Sanctions compliance, Anti-Bribery & Corruption compliance, and GDPR compliance, so customers can choose to deploy a mix of risk modules that addresses their specific needs.
We package our offering into Core Compliance Solutions (Anti-bribery & corruption compliance, Competition compliance, Sanctions compliance), Cyber Security Solutions (GDPR compliance, Data Loss Prevention, PCI DSS compliance), and Employee Wellbeing Solutions (Inappropriate content, Bullying prevention). With pharma and financial services being highly regulated sectors, the Core Compliance Solutions address fundamental compliance requirements.
Looking ahead to the future, how do you envision the future of proactive compliance—what trends or capabilities excite you most?
We have been using spell checkers for decades now, and I think no one is as adventurous as to turn this off—you can do this, by the way. In 5–10 years’ time we will look back and think ‘How on Earth have we ever sent a business email or message without an automated compliance checker?’ The future of compliance is proactive and leveraging technologies like AI will be fundamental to enabling that. I believe that AI has a key role to play in supporting and augmenting work across all sectors and I am a firm believer in human-AI collaboration where the AI assists and enables us to work more effectively and efficiently.
