compliance
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What Michael Berman Saw in the Fine Print
A banking lawyer built Ncontracts around the risks hiding in vendor agreements. Seventeen years later, Michael Berman is asking what happens when the vendor starts thinking for itself.
Ashley Walsh, Between the Rulebook and the Team Sheet
Ashley Walsh’s route to leading BGC Group in Australia and New Zealand runs through law, compliance and Asian markets. His place on the Family of League board adds another connection: the game his own family plays.
Joe Robinson and the art of getting people together
Before he co-founded Hummingbird, Joe Robinson brought designers and technologists into the same room. His work in financial-crime investigations keeps returning to a familiar problem: helping people, information, and tools work together.
David Merriby and the bank still in the future tense
After a career in law, compliance and risk, David Merriby has been appointed CEO of the future KOHO Bank. His next assignment puts the rules of banking at the centre of building one.
Jay Springman Built a Career Where Marketing Has to Pass the Fine Print
A law-school education, P&L discipline and three unusually compatible titles reveal an executive career built at the junction of persuasion, protection and proof.
Nataliia Chornohub Is Turning Open Data Into a Trust Machine
After years of persuading institutions to open their records, the Ukrainian executive now has a harder brief: make those records useful when the stakes include sanctions, reconstruction and national security.
Chaitanya Sarda Is Turning Compliance Into a Product Problem
After years deciding whether unknown callers could be trusted at Google, the AiPrise co-founder is applying the same systems instinct to a slower, messier question: how businesses decide whom to let in.
Rushabh Shah
Rushabh Shah is the co-founder and co-CEO of AiPrise, a Y Combinator-backed (S22) global compliance platform that lets companies verify customers and businesses in more than 150 countries through a single interface. A former Meta engineer who worked on developer-focused products and payments, he started AiPrise in 2022 with Chaitanya Sarda after a weekend scramble to make a YC deadline. The company has raised roughly $14.6M, including a $12.5M Series A led by Headline in October 2025, and serves 150+ customers including Bridge (a Stripe company) and dLocal.
Snigdha Kumar
Snigdha Kumar is the CEO and co-founder of Brico, a San Francisco regtech startup that automates the slow, state-by-state process of getting and keeping financial licenses for payments, lending, mortgage and crypto companies. A Harvard-trained public policy analyst with more than a decade in fintech across the U.S., India, Indonesia and Myanmar, she previously led product operations at the savings app Digit. In October 2025 Brico raised a $13.5M Series A led by Flourish Ventures, on the back of 600% year-over-year growth.
Will Lawrence
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
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.
Dan Zitting
Dan Zitting is the CEO of Nitrogen, the wealth management technology company formerly known as Riskalyze, best known for its Risk Number and advisor growth platform. Before wealthtech, he spent more than a decade building governance, risk and compliance software: he founded the cloud audit tool Workpapers.com, ran Galvanize (formerly ACL) as CEO and grew it to roughly $100M in ARR, and helped steer its roughly $1 billion sale to Diligent, where he served as Chief Product and Strategy Officer. He took the top job at Nitrogen in December 2023, focused on helping financial advisors reduce friction and grow through connected workflows and AI.
Hugo Finkelstein
Hugo Finkelstein is the co-founder and CEO of Rise, a global payroll and compliance company that lets businesses pay contractors and employees across 190+ countries in local currency, stablecoins, or crypto. What started at Babson College as a campus buy-and-sell app turned into a career in crypto community-building and, eventually, a payroll platform that has processed more than $1 billion in payments. Rise raised a $6.3M Series A in November 2024 led by Draper Associates and Polymorphic Capital, and Finkelstein has become one of the clearest voices arguing that the real stablecoin use case is not trading, it is payroll.
Martin Markiewicz
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.
Michael Sanocki
Michael Sanocki is the founder and CEO of RQD* Clearing, a New York-based cloud-native correspondent clearing firm that processes billions of dollars of US equity and options trades daily. An attorney by training who spent years inside the SEC, the ISE options exchange, and Volant Trading before running RQD, he argues that legacy clearing is 'broken' and is rebuilding it in real time on Microsoft Azure.
Nick Macario
Nick Macario is co-founder and CEO of Verifiable, an Austin-based healthcare credentialing platform that replaces weeks of paperwork with API-driven verifications and, more recently, an autonomous AI agent called CredAgent. A multi-time founder (Branded.me, Remote.com, Dock.io), he raised a $27M Series B from Craft Ventures in 2023 and is backed by Sam and Jack Altman.
Sam Li
Sam Li is co-founder and CEO of Thoropass, the New York-based information security compliance and audit platform formerly known as Laika. He grew up in Shanghai, studied computer science and economics at the University of Virginia, worked at Goldman Sachs and Google, dropped out of Harvard Business School to run a YC-backed insurtech called Zinc Platform, watched it die, spent a year as an EIR at Bain Capital Ventures, then in 2019 co-founded a company to make SOC 2 audits less miserable. Thoropass has raised roughly $98 million across four rounds and now combines software with a licensed audit practice.
Ajit Tharaken
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.
Bruno Lecoq
Bruno Lecoq is the French-born co-founder, CEO and Chief Information Security Officer of BEMO, a Redmond, Washington cybersecurity and compliance company built for small and mid-sized businesses living inside the Microsoft cloud. After roughly two decades at Microsoft - working across MS-DOS, Windows, Exchange, Office and the hardware supply chain before becoming a director of business processes - he left to fix a gap he kept seeing: real, affordable security for companies too small for an enterprise security team. Since 2010 BEMO has grown into a Microsoft Direct CSP and US Partner of the Year, a back-to-back Inc 5000 honoree, and the maker of a SaaS platform that automates Microsoft 365 security and compliance for over a thousand businesses.
Matt Pelc
Matt Pelc is the co-founder and CEO of Plane, the all-in-one people platform (formerly Pilot) that helps fast-growing startups pay and manage employees and contractors in 100+ countries. A Cambridge-trained computer scientist who got his start writing Ruby and building Slack bots, he went through Y Combinator's Winter 2017 batch and has spent the better part of a decade trying to make a worker's location irrelevant to whether a company will hire them.
Arjun Mahadevan
Arjun Mahadevan is the co-founder and CEO of doola, a New York based company that turns the headache of starting a U.S. business into a few clicks. Built after his own frustrating attempt to incorporate a company across borders, doola handles LLC formation, banking, bookkeeping and taxes for founders in more than 175 countries. A Wharton and Penn dual-degree graduate and former Dropbox growth PM, Arjun walked away from a comfortable big-tech job at 24 to build a 'Business-in-a-Box' on the belief that talent is everywhere but opportunity is not. He hosts the 15-Minute Founder podcast and writes a newsletter read by a large weekly audience.
Alastair Wood
Alastair Wood is the CEO of Raisin US, the American arm of the Berlin-born deposit-marketplace fintech. A lawyer by training who started as the company's General Counsel in 2023, he stepped into the top job in January 2026. His career runs through Big Law (Paul Hastings, Paul Weiss), a chief-of-staff stint inside Citi's global legal team, and early-employee roles at two scrappy fintech startups - retirement platform Kindur and renter-insurance company Rhino - before he landed at Raisin, where he now leads a platform that connects everyday American savers with banks and credit unions chasing deposits.
Ayush Sharma
Ayush Sharma is the founder and CEO of Warp, an AI-native employee management, payroll, and compliance platform built for high-growth startups. An MIT computer science and physics graduate and former Yelp ML engineer, he started Warp out of Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch to fix the government red tape he hated as a distributed-team founder. Warp now runs payroll across all 50 US states and 150+ countries for hundreds of startups, and in June 2025 raised an $18M Series A led by Sound Ventures.
Peter Piatetsky
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.
Julie Iskow
Julie Iskow is the President and CEO of Workiva, the cloud platform behind a lot of the world's regulatory, ESG, and financial reporting. A Bay Area engineer who spent her first decade in robotics and automation, she scaled SaaS companies through IPOs and acquisitions before taking over from Workiva's founder in April 2023.
Adi Goel
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.
Christina Cacioppo
Christina Cacioppo is the co-founder and CEO of Vanta, the agentic trust management platform that has become the default infrastructure for security compliance among modern tech companies. After stints at Union Square Ventures and Dropbox Paper, she built Vanta from a spreadsheet prototype into a $4.15 billion company serving 12,000+ organizations across 58 countries, raising $504 million in total funding. She is one of America's self-made female billionaires, known for applying rigorous first-principles thinking to the usually-dull world of corporate security.
Joyce Salas
Joyce Salas is a Founder at Deel, the San Francisco-based global HR and payroll platform that has redefined how companies hire, pay, and manage international teams. Based in Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil, she brings a finance and accounting lens to one of the fastest-growing HR tech companies in the world - a company that has raised over $1.27 billion in funding, crossed $1 billion in annual revenue, and employs more than 8,400 people serving businesses in 150+ countries.
Kurt Ruppel
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
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.