Stuart Jones Jr.

A counterterrorism playbook, rewritten as code

Most fintech founders pitch a deck. Stuart Jones Jr. can tell you what it feels like to trace a wire transfer through Kabul while the building you are sitting in is fortified against people who would prefer the money keep moving. That is the texture of the career behind Sigma360, the New York company he co-founded and runs as CEO from an office at 40 Wall Street. The product is enterprise software. The instinct underneath it is older and stranger than that.

Sigma360 is an AI-powered, full-stack risk intelligence platform. In plain terms: when a bank, a payments company, or a globally exposed corporation needs to know whether the counterparty on the other side of a deal is clean, Sigma360 is the system that screens, scores, and keeps watching. Point-in-time risk screening at onboarding. Perpetual monitoring after. Adverse media, sanctions and watchlist screening, entity resolution, the whole apparatus of financial crime compliance folded into one platform instead of the dozen brittle tools most institutions stitch together.

The numbers say it is working. In March 2026 the company closed an oversubscribed $17.3 million Series B led by Moderne Ventures, with Vocap Partners and Orrick joining and earlier backers Contour Ventures and Mosaik Partners following on. Sigma360 reached profitability in 2025, grew 5X over two years, and carries net revenue retention north of 140 percent with gross retention of 95 percent. Its platform, the company says, now protects more than $2 trillion in assets and company value, screening billions of dollars of transactional flow every month across banks, payments firms, fintechs, and globally exposed corporations. Chartis ranked it first in its 2026 Financial Crime and Compliance50, and named it a top adverse media solution for the second consecutive year.

Moderne Ventures partner Liza Benson framed the bet in market terms when the round was announced, describing Sigma360 as "redefining a $300 billion financial crime compliance industry by building trusted AI infrastructure." That is the size of the problem Jones is pointing his company at: not a niche, but the entire machinery institutions use to vet who they let into the financial system. The capital is going toward sharpening Sigma360's proprietary risk datasets, deepening its AI automation, and widening its reach in regulated markets worldwide.

Before the cap table, the field

Jones did not arrive at this from a venture internship. He spent the formative part of his career inside the U.S. Treasury Department, the agency that turns sanctions and financial intelligence into instruments of foreign policy. He served as Treasury's Financial Attache to Afghanistan for two years, overseeing the department's largest overseas investment in technical personnel, and as Financial Attache to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, where the brief was macroeconomic stability and the disruption of illicit finance across a region where money rarely travels in straight lines.

Before he went abroad, the work was closer to home and just as pointed. He was a senior advisor in Treasury's Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, and he was detailed for 15 months to help stand up the National Counterterrorism Center's Directorate of Strategic Operational Planning, the post-9/11 machinery for coordinating how the United States goes after the funding behind violence. For that decade of service at home and overseas he collected two Secretary's Honor Awards and the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award.

Then he did the thing former government people are warned against and built a company anyway. After Treasury he became an executive at Ernst & Young, running strategic growth for the forensic practice across select emerging markets in the Middle East. And he went back to school as a Sloan Fellow at MIT, where the founding of Sigma was less a pivot than a logical next sentence.

A meeting at MIT, then a category nobody had named

At MIT Sloan he met Gabrielle Haddad, an international development lawyer, while both were pursuing MBAs focused on innovation and global leadership. The two of them noticed the same gap: credit ratings tell you whether a company can pay you back, but say nothing about whether doing business with it will one day land you in front of a regulator. In 2018 they launched Sigma Ratings and billed it, with some justification, as the world's first non-credit risk ratings agency. The seed round was $2.4 million, the ambition was to become "the ratings company of the future," and the thesis was almost philosophical.

The ratings idea matured into something more useful than a score. In 2023 Sigma Ratings became Sigma360, and the pitch shifted from rating risk to operating it: a cloud-native, low-code platform that lets compliance teams run screening and decisioning at the speed their adversaries actually work. The rebrand was the moment the company stopped being an agency that grades and became a system that acts.

The vocabulary tells you where the company lives. Perpetual KYC, the idea that you never stop monitoring a client once you have onboarded them. Entity and relationship mapping, so a clean-looking customer does not turn out to be one handshake from a sanctioned name. Adverse media screening that reads the news so an analyst does not have to. Risk-data-agnostic architecture, so an institution can plug in its own intelligence rather than be locked into one vendor's worldview. It is a stack built on a single conviction: that the slow, false-positive-choked compliance workflows of the last decade are no match for the speed at which money, and the people hiding inside it, now move.

Why the resume matters to the product

There is a reason Sigma360 keeps its founder's Treasury years in the first paragraph of every press release. The hardest part of fighting financial crime is not the math, it is knowing what a real threat looks like when it is buried in a million false positives. Jones spent years on the side of the desk where a missed signal had consequences measured in something other than churn. The platform's obsession with false-positive reduction, perpetual KYC, and entity resolution reads less like a feature list and more like a list of the things that used to keep an attache up at night.

He is, by the accounts that exist publicly, the opposite of the hype-cycle founder. The language is measured. The claims are specific and footnoted by metrics. The company reached profitability instead of torching capital to manufacture a growth chart, which in the current fintech climate counts as a personality trait. For someone whose first career was built on telling the difference between a clean transaction and a dangerous one, the restraint tracks.

It shows up in the company he built, too. Sigma360 is a small team, 53 people at last count, carrying the kind of asset-protection figures usually attached to firms many times its size. That ratio is the whole argument for the software: leverage. One analyst armed with a system that screens, scores, and never sleeps can cover ground that once took a department. Jones spent years on the manual version of that job, in places where the stakes were not quarterly. He has a fairly clear idea of what the machine is supposed to replace, and what it is not.

What he is reaching for

The stated goal is bigger than a product roadmap. Jones talks about building trusted AI infrastructure for an industry, financial crime compliance, that Moderne Ventures pegs at roughly $300 billion. The Series B capital is earmarked for deepening Sigma360's proprietary risk datasets, pushing further into AI-driven automation, and expanding the go-to-market across banks, payment providers, and regulated corporations worldwide. The bet, consistent since the MIT whiteboard, is that you can incentivize good corporate behavior with better information, and that better information is now a software problem.

It is a long way from a fortified office in Kabul to a Series B announcement on a March morning in Manhattan. But the through-line is unbroken: follow the money, find the risk, and make it harder for the wrong people to hide inside the system everyone else relies on. Jones just swapped a government badge for a platform, and decided to do it at the scale of the entire market.