
Will Lawrence is the co-founder and CEO of Bretton AI, the San Francisco company formerly known as Greenlite AI that builds AI agents for financial crime and compliance operations. After leading anti-money laundering product work at Facebook/Meta and building compliance infrastructure at Paxos, he started the company in 2023 to automate the slow, manual investigative work behind KYC, AML and sanctions checks. In February 2026 the company rebranded to Bretton AI and raised a $75 million Series B led by Sapphire Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $90 million, with customers including Robinhood, Mercury, Ramp, Gusto and a set of OCC-, FDIC- and Federal Reserve-regulated banks.
Craig Costigan is the CEO of NICE Actimize, the financial crime and compliance software division of NICE, a role he has held since 2018. He leads market strategy, product, R&D, sales and marketing for a business that helps banks and other financial institutions fight money laundering, fraud and market abuse. A founding partner of a securities finance software firm in the early 1990s, he built a three-decade career in capital markets technology at K-Tek International, SunGard and FIS before taking the top job at NICE Actimize, where he has pushed the company toward generative and agentic AI.
Eli Wachs is the co-founder and CEO of Footprint, a New York identity verification company building what he calls the identity layer for the internet. Footprint helps banks, real estate firms, auto dealers, and other businesses onboard customers by automating KYC and fraud checks while storing personal data inside secure enclaves. A Stanford economics and history graduate and former General Atlantic investor, Wachs started the company in 2022 with CTO Alex Grinman and has raised roughly $20 million to pursue a blunt goal: reduce digital identity theft toward zero while giving people more control over their own data.
Martin Markiewicz is the co-founder and CEO of Silent Eight, a Singapore-headquartered regtech that builds AI models banks use to screen names, transactions and alerts for money-laundering, sanctions and terrorist-financing risk. A mathematician by training with roots in Poland's tech scene, he has spent the last decade convincing tier-one banks to let algorithms make the first call on suspicious activity.
Mriganka Pattnaik is the co-founder and CEO of Merkle Science, a blockchain transaction monitoring and forensics company he started in 2018 after seeing, from inside crypto exchange Luno, how badly banks and regulators wanted a way to track illicit crypto flows. Under his lead, Merkle Science has raised over $24 million in Series A funding from investors including Kraken Ventures, Digital Currency Group, BECO Capital, and Susquehanna's Darrow Holdings, and now sells its 'Know Your Transaction' tools to VASPs, financial institutions, and law enforcement.
Ajit Tharaken is the CEO of Consilient, a Washington, D.C. fintech building federated-learning AI to catch financial crime without ever moving a bank's data. A Columbia-trained computer scientist, he previously ran Opus Global (Alacra) through its sale to NICE Actimize, then led NICE Actimize's Data Intelligence business. He pitches a blunt thesis: the global anti-money-laundering system is outdated, and the fix is letting institutions train AI models locally and share the intelligence, not the data.
Alexandre Berkovic is the co-founder and CEO of Sphinx (YC F24), a San Francisco company building browser-native AI agents that do the grunt work of financial compliance - the KYC, AML and KYB checks that banks and fintechs run millions of times a year. He trained as a Design Engineer at Imperial College London and studied machine learning at MIT, did research on multi-modal generative AI, and co-founded and exited an audio-generation startup, Adorno AI, before pivoting into compliance with co-founder Chrisjan Wust. In February 2026 Sphinx raised a $7.1M seed led by Cherry Ventures.
Austin Trombley is the founder and CEO of Satschel, Inc., the Whitefish, Montana parent company behind Liquidity.io (a regulated tokenized trading platform), Simplici (KYC/AML onboarding and compliance), and ARQ Securities. A software engineer turned fintech executive, he co-founded the machine-learning hedge fund Random Forest Capital, which Franklin Templeton acquired roughly 15 months in, then served as VP of Blockchain & AI at Franklin Templeton and EVP at the payments company SpotOn before building Satschel's stack for bringing private credit and private equity onto public blockchains.
Rhim Shah is the co-founder and CEO of Arva AI, a Y Combinator and Google AI Fund-backed startup building auditable AI agents that automate financial crime compliance reviews for banks and fintechs. An Oxford engineering graduate who led the FinCrime product team at Revolut Business, he spent hundreds of hours shadowing compliance analysts before deciding the mundane, repetitive work of AML, KYB and KYC could be done faster and deeper by AI. Arva now automates as much as 80-92% of manual review work and counts leading UK and US banks among its customers.
David N. Cook, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of Edgewood Oncology, a Boston-based virtual biotech advancing BTX-A51, a first-in-class small molecule that hits three master regulators of cancer at once (CK1 alpha, CDK7 and CDK9) to switch on programmed cell death. A chemist by training, with an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, Cook has spent roughly 30 years building venture-backed life sciences companies, helping raise more than $1 billion, leading three IPOs, orchestrating two acquisitions, and contributing to five commercialized products. He emerged Edgewood from stealth in March 2024 with a $20 million Series A led by Alta Partners.
Vatsa Narasimha is the CEO of ComplyAdvantage, the London-based regtech building AI-native tools to detect and disrupt financial crime. A ceramics engineer turned consultant turned operator, he ran foreign-exchange platform OANDA before joining ComplyAdvantage as COO/CFO in 2018, then taking the top job in 2022. He has pushed the company past $100M in funding, 3,000+ enterprise customers, and a billion-plus searches a year, while reframing compliance as an asymmetric fight that only AI-native systems can win.
Peter Piatetsky is the co-founder and CEO of Castellum.AI, a New York compliance-technology company that automates AML/KYC screening for banks, credit unions, fintechs and crypto firms. A former US Treasury sanctions officer who once fined banks and froze illicit assets, he started Castellum after a month of staring at 38,000 compliance alerts that surfaced exactly one real threat. The company builds its own financial-crime data pipeline, refreshes it every five minutes, and routinely corrects errors in government sanctions lists. In July 2025 Castellum raised an oversubscribed $8.5M Series A led by credit-union and bank-backed funds.
Stuart Jones Jr. is the co-founder and CEO of Sigma360, an AI-powered risk intelligence platform fighting financial crime for banks, payment providers and globally exposed corporations. A former senior U.S. Treasury official who chased illicit money through Afghanistan and the Arabian Gulf after 9/11, he turned a counterterrorism playbook into enterprise software. In March 2026 his company closed an oversubscribed $17.3M Series B, having reached profitability and the now protecting more than $2 trillion in assets.

Maite Muniz Telleria is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Truora Inc., a San Francisco- and Colombia-based startup that helps Latin American businesses verify identities, run background checks, and automate customer engagement via WhatsApp. A former McKinsey consultant turned startup builder, she left corporate strategy to co-found Truora in 2018 alongside Daniel Bilbao, David Cuadrado, and Cesar Pino. Under her product leadership, Truora scaled from a single-country MVP to a multi-country platform serving clients like Bancolombia, Didi, Mercado Libre, and Rappi, raising $15M in a Series A led by Accel and BBVA's Propel fund in 2022. Maite is also an angel investor focused on women-led ventures and a board member of The F Code.
Adi Goel is co-founder and COO of Sardine, an AI-powered fraud and compliance platform that has screened over $1.36 trillion in payments for 300+ enterprise customers across 70+ countries. Before Sardine, he scaled Revolut's entire US business from zero to millions of customers and led product strategy at Deutsche Börse managing a $200M fintech fund. A Wharton MBA and IIT Delhi engineer, Goel brings rare cross-disciplinary range across quantitative finance, product, and operations to building fintech infrastructure.
Cesar Pino is the co-founder of Truora Inc., a Y Combinator-backed identity verification and fraud prevention platform built for Latin America. An electronic engineer with a specialization in cryptography from Universidad del Valle in Colombia, Pino previously worked as a fullstack engineer at Twilio before co-founding Truora in 2018 with Daniel Bilbao, David Cuadrado, and Maite Muniz Telleria. Truora helps companies across 9+ Latin American countries onboard users digitally through background checks, facial recognition, KYC/AML compliance, and WhatsApp-powered customer engagement - serving clients like Rappi, Bancolombia, Mercado Libre, and Uber. The company has raised ~$40M in total funding including a $15M Series A led by BBVA's Propel fund and Accel.
Daniel Bilbao is the co-founder and CEO of Truora Inc., a San Francisco-based identity verification and digital onboarding platform serving Latin America. Born in Cali, Colombia, Bilbao studied electronic engineering at Universidad de los Andes and earned an MBA from Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth before stints at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Silicon Valley startups. He founded Truora in 2018 alongside David Cuadrado, Maite Muniz Telleria, and Cesar Pino, solving a problem he knew firsthand: background checks in Latin America took up to three weeks. Truora compresses that to under 20 seconds. The company has raised ~$40M in total funding including a $15M Series A led by Accel and BBVA's Propel fund in 2022, grew revenue to $32.1M in 2024, reached break-even, and expanded to seven countries. Beyond Truora, Bilbao co-founded Colombia Tech Week and the B2 Founders seed fund with his brother Andres Bilbao, co-founder of Rappi.
Emily Garza is a customer success executive, founder, and one of the most recognized voices in the CS profession. As Head of Customer Engagement at Unit21 - an AI-powered fraud and AML risk platform trusted by 200+ financial institutions - she oversees the entire post-sale customer journey. She is also the founder of ValueCSwithEmily, a platform and community that produces podcasts, articles, and resources for CS professionals. Named a Top 25 Customer Success Influencer in 2023 and a Top 100 CS Strategist in 2021 and 2022, Garza built her career scaling CS organizations from the ground up at companies like Fastly and Proton.ai, growing recurring revenue from $60M to $300M+ at Fastly alone.

Kurt Ruppel is the Co-Founder and CTO of Middesk, the business identity platform that helps financial institutions, fintechs, and marketplaces verify and onboard businesses in seconds rather than weeks. A UC Berkeley cognitive science alumnus turned engineer, he built his technical chops at Zendesk and Checkr before co-founding Middesk with Kyle Mack in 2018. The company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch, secured a $4M seed led by Accel and Sequoia before Demo Day ended, and raised a $57M Series B in 2022—bringing total funding to over $77M. Ruppel leads Middesk's technical vision, focusing on primitives and forward concepts that transform raw business data into actionable intelligence for the financial ecosystem.
Kyle Mack is the CEO and Co-founder of Middesk, the business identity platform that's modernizing how financial institutions and fintechs verify and trust the companies they work with. Founded in 2018 after Mack witnessed firsthand the painful manual process of customer credentialing at Checkr, Middesk has grown into a category-defining KYB infrastructure company backed by Sequoia Capital, Accel, Insight Partners, and Canapi Ventures with $77M+ in total funding. The company serves hundreds of enterprise clients - including two of the top three U.S. banks and fintechs like Plaid, Affirm, Brex, and Shopify - by connecting to roughly 400 U.S. government agencies to surface real-time business identity intelligence. Mack is also a Sequoia Scout, investing in early-stage founders.
Rahul Raina is the Co-Founder and CTO of TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company that helps governments, financial institutions, and crypto businesses detect and investigate financial crime on the blockchain. Born out of a failed game startup, TRM Labs now serves 600+ government agencies across 75+ countries, achieved unicorn status in February 2026 with a $70M Series C at a $1B valuation, and is recognized as a leading force in making the crypto ecosystem safer. Rahul was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2022.

Rick Song is the Co-Founder and CEO of Persona, the identity verification platform trusted by OpenAI, Instacart, LinkedIn, and 3,000+ others. A self-described reluctant founder, he left Square in 2018 after five years working on fraud and identity products, convinced there was a better way to build identity infrastructure. By 2025, Persona had completed 300+ million verifications, crossed $100M ARR, raised a $200M Series D at a $2B valuation, and was named a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for Identity Verification for the second consecutive year.
Ricardo Amper is the Founder and CEO of Incode Technologies, a San Francisco-based AI-powered identity verification unicorn valued at $1.25 billion. A Mexican-born serial entrepreneur with two prior exits totaling ~$200 million, Amper built Incode from a near-failed social media startup into a global leader in biometric authentication and KYC/AML compliance — processing over 4 billion identity checks for clients including Citi, Nubank, Ford Credit, and government agencies. He is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer contributor, a champion of Gen Z hiring, and the driving force behind Incode's DeepSight deepfake-detection platform.
Tyler Allen is the CEO of Unit21, the AI risk infrastructure company he helped build from the ground up as its founding software engineer in 2019. Starting by writing Unit21's earliest lines of code, he progressed through Head of AI and COO before being appointed CEO in April 2026, succeeding co-founder Trisha Kothari. Under his AI leadership, customer usage of Unit21's AI Agents grew 30x in a single quarter. Unit21's platform now handles over 200,000 monthly reviews, has detected $14 billion in suspicious activity, and files approximately 5% of all U.S. SARs submitted to FinCEN.
Vicky Bindra is the CEO of Trulioo, a Vancouver-based global identity verification platform that has raised $478M in funding. A Chartered Accountant with an MBA from MIT Sloan, Bindra brings nearly 30 years of fintech and payments experience from leadership roles at Visa, Mastercard, Citi, GE Capital, Pine Labs, FIS, and Nuvei. Appointed CEO of Trulioo on April 1, 2025, he is now focused on accelerating product innovation, AI integration, and establishing Trulioo as the trusted infrastructure layer for digital identity in the era of agentic commerce.
Ari Tuchman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Quantifind, a Palo Alto-based AI risk intelligence company that uses machine learning, entity resolution, and natural language processing to automate financial crime detection and compliance workflows for Tier 1 banks and government agencies. A Harvard-trained physicist with a Yale Ph.D. in atomic physics, Tuchman left a Stanford research career working on DARPA-funded quantum sensors to co-found Quantifind in 2009. His company's Graphyte platform now analyzes millions of entities, reduces false positives by up to 75%, and auto-resolves 90% of risk cases for global financial institutions. He is also a co-founder of Entanglement Technologies, a quantum chemical sensor company.
Esteban Castano is the Co-founder and CEO of TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company he built into a billion-dollar unicorn on a mission to fight crypto crime. A Dartmouth-educated, Stanford MBA dropout, Castano co-founded TRM in 2018 after recognizing that the coming wave of digital asset adoption would need a trust layer - a platform to detect fraud, trace illicit funds, and keep crypto safe for governments, banks, and legitimate users. With $279.9M raised, clients including Goldman Sachs, Coinbase, and the US Department of Justice, and the world's first FedRAMP High-authorized blockchain intelligence platform, TRM Labs now sits at the center of crypto's fight against money laundering, terrorism financing, and organized crime.