Johan Brissmyr is the CEO and co-founder of Castle, a security company that helps online businesses detect fraud, bots, and account takeover in real time. A computer scientist from Lund University, he started building web products in Malmo, Sweden before moving to Silicon Valley through Y Combinator and relocating the company to New York. Castle grew out of a password-storage side project that revealed a bigger opportunity in behavioral risk scoring, and today combines device fingerprinting, behavioral signals, and analytics into APIs used by companies of many sizes.
Idan Bar-Dov is the co-founder and CEO of Heka Global, a New York and Tel Aviv company that turns the public web into real-time, audit-ready digital identities for banks, insurers, and pension funds. A fintech lawyer turned operator, he started Heka during the pandemic to reconnect people with lost financial assets and grew it into a fraud-fighting web-intelligence engine used by institutions like Barclays and Pictet. In July 2025 Heka closed a $14M Series A led by Windare Ventures, with Bar-Dov arguing that the credit bureaus built for a paper era cannot see a world where both consumers and risk now live online.
Andre Ferraz is the co-founder and CEO of Incognia, a Palo Alto-based privacy-first location identity company that uses passive behavioral signals - where your phone goes, how it moves, what Wi-Fi networks it trusts - to verify users without passwords or biometric friction. Before Incognia, Ferraz co-founded In Loco Media in 2011 at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, building it into a company that mapped 6 million indoor venues and captured 250 billion location data points monthly, before selling it to Brazilian retail giant Magazine Luiza in 2020. With Incognia, he pivoted that location intelligence from advertising into fraud prevention, raising $46.5M total (including a $31M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners in 2024), deploying technology on over 200 million smartphones, and pioneering what he calls zero-factor authentication - security that works without the user doing anything at all.
Nate Kharrl is the Co-Founder and CEO of Spec (specprotected.com), a San Jose-based fraud prevention platform that uses behavioral analytics to detect and block sophisticated fraud, bots, and abuse before they impact customers. With a career spanning Akamai Technologies, ThreatMetrix, and eBay, Kharrl channeled nearly a decade of watching fraud fighters struggle with siloed tools into founding Spec in 2020. The company has raised over $33 million in funding, including a $15 million Series A led by SignalFire in October 2023, and protects Fortune 500 companies transacting billions in online commerce.