Why consulting veteran Bhavin Shah launched AI regulatory intelligence platform Sherlocq
After 25 years advising financial institutions and regulators at the intersection of regulation, financial crime, enforcement and governance, Bhavin Shah recently took an entrepreneurial turn with the launch of his own business: Sherlocq.
A former partner across Big Four firms Deloitte, PwC and EY, as well as global consultancies Roland Berger and Secretariat, Shah has led multimillion-dollar engagements across the Middle East, the UK, the US, and Asia.
A former Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, Shah is based in the UAE, where he is building Sherlocq – an AI-powered regulatory intelligence platform designed to make the work of compliance officers, lawyers and consultants significantly more efficient and effective. Hot on the heels of Sherlocq securing growth capital, we sat down with Shah to learn more about the venture and its ambitions.
You spent 25 years building and leading practices across major consulting firms. What was the moment you decided to leave and build Sherlocq?
It was an accumulation of the same frustration, repeated across every firm and every engagement: brilliant professionals spending days doing work that should not have required their time.
The research phase on a complex cross-border matter could consume a week. A senior associate manually pulling source documents, cross-referencing jurisdictions, trying to build a coherent picture of what three different regulators require. The underlying intelligence layer was either fragmented across expensive databases, buried in dense regulatory text, or simply absent for the jurisdictions that mattered most.
Harvey AI proved that a vertical AI platform, built with genuine depth for a specific professional domain, can become the infrastructure of how that industry works. That confirms what practitioners already knew: domain-specific AI built with genuine depth becomes the infrastructure of how an industry works. Regulatory intelligence is a structurally larger and more globally fragmented problem than legal research, and it has never had a practitioner-designed answer.
The compliance cost base exceeds $300 billion annually across more than ten million professionals. What it needed was someone who had spent 25 years in the problem. I decided that person should be me.
How does your consulting background shape the way Sherlocq is built?
Most compliance AI products are built by technology teams that import domain expertise as an advisory layer. The product ends up designed around what engineers think practitioners need. Sherlocq inverts that. I spent 25 years at the table with regulators, bank boards, and compliance officers at moments of genuine institutional pressure.
As a result, I understand not just what the questions are, but what wrong answers cost, and what an output needs to look like to be useful in a boardroom or a regulatory examination.
That shapes everything: citation-backed outputs that can be traced to source, the jurisdictions we prioritised, the trust architecture. ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certifications were requirements I knew from experience, not features, and Sherlocq is among a small minority of AI compliance platforms to achieve both at launch stage.
The deeper point is that Sherlocq is not a better search engine. It is the navigation system for compliance: eliminating the hours of manual work that precede a judgment call, so the professionals in the room are making decisions rather than processing information.
Consulting firms are both potential buyers and potential competitors. How do you see that relationship playing out?
Primarily as partners and buyers, and I say that from direct experience. We have been in active dialogue with senior leaders across major consulting firms about Sherlocq as the AI intelligence layer that gives their financial services teams a measurable edge: regulatory research completed in minutes rather than days, across more jurisdictions, with cited outputs their clients can act on.
The proposition is not about replacing advisory judgment. It is about making the practitioners who apply that judgment significantly more capable.
The Big Four are in the business of deploying people to solve complex problems. Building and maintaining a curated multi-jurisdiction regulatory intelligence platform is not their core commercial architecture. What they are far more likely to do is embed Sherlocq within their delivery model. Where firms are building internal tools, I welcome the validation: it confirms the category is real.
Sherlocq’s curated corpus, practitioner-designed output logic, and cross-jurisdictional depth cannot be assembled quickly by a firm whose primary business is advisory.
Your advisory board includes senior figures from global financial regulation, banking, and institutional services. How important is that credibility?
It is not important. It is a precondition. A bank cannot adopt a compliance research tool and then be unable to explain to its regulator how outputs are generated, what sources they are based on, or how data is handled. The bar is materially higher than in most enterprise technology categories, and the advisory board was assembled with that in mind: practitioners who would impose on Sherlocq the same standards they have applied throughout their careers.
Our board includes Arnold Ekpe, former Group CEO of Ecobank; Bhaskar Dasgupta, Non-Executive Director at Apex Group; and Gaurang Desai, former CEO of the Dubai Commodity Exchange. They all bring direct insight into what compliance infrastructure requirements look like from an institutional governance perspective.
Nikos Patsiogiannis, a member of our advisory board based in Greece, brings insight from the European market. Bryan Stirewalt, former Chief Executives of the DFSA, provides insight into how supervisory expectations are evolving across the Middle East region.
Their endorsement carries weight in boardrooms in a way that no marketing claim can replicate.
Sherlocq has offices in New York and Abu Dhabi. Why those two cities?
The two offices reflect the two axes around which the global compliance market turns. New York is the world’s largest financial centre by concentration of banks, asset managers, law firms, and compliance teams making consequential decisions daily, and the centre of gravity for institutional technology investment.
Abu Dhabi, where Sherlocq is licensed within ADGM, gives us institutional credibility built from within the financial ecosystem we serve, under English common law, with a regulatory framework that global counterparties respect.
Zooming in on the region: The GCC compliance market is growing significantly. What is driving that and where does Sherlocq fit?
Three forces are converging. The pace of regulatory reform across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and their peers is genuinely unusual: VARA, CBUAE, the DFSA, and ADGM’s FSRA are all issuing guidance and updating frameworks continuously.
Layered on that is cross-border complexity: an institution operating across UAE, Bahrain, and the US simultaneously needs comparative intelligence across all three regimes within the same analysis. The third force is a talent constraint that rarely receives enough attention: the GCC has significant demand for compliance professionals relative to supply, and AI-powered intelligence extends the effective capacity of the teams institutions already have.
Finally, what are the ambitions for the period ahead
The next twelve months are about depth and conversion. On the product side: a policy generation engine that moves from research into drafting, real-time regulatory news intelligence, a knowledge graph layer, and full enterprise API and SSO capabilities. An on-premises option for regulators and tier 1 banks is targeted for Q4 2026.
On the commercial side, the priority is converting our active enterprise pipeline into signed pilots and annual contracts across banks, law firms, consulting firms, and regulators in the GCC, UK, and beyond.
The immediate expansion priorities are London and Singapore. Beyond those, we are building a European regulatory intelligence hub centred on Athens, where multilingual legal professionals can curate content inside the EU regulatory perimeter.
The target is 100-plus jurisdictions by our third year. Sherlocq is not a UAE platform with global ambitions. The global architecture was built into the structure from the beginning because the problem we are solving does not respect borders.
