financial-crime
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Annalisa Camarillo Learned the Machines. Then She Taught Them to Mean Something.
Her career began in an engineering department and grew through psychology, publishing and enterprise software. At Quantifind, Annalisa Camarillo turns the hidden machinery of risk intelligence into a story that people can act on.
Jonathan Daly Bet on Behavior Before Banking Had a Better Answer
The BioCatch CMO has spent a career naming hard-to-see threats. His latest argument is disarmingly human: the way people type, tap and swipe may tell banks more than another password ever could.
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.
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.
Evan Kohlmann
Evan Kohlmann spent two decades tracking terrorists through their own chatrooms, earning the nickname 'the Terrorist Search Engine.' He built cyberintelligence firm Flashpoint from his bedroom, wrote its original code, and served as NBC News' terrorism analyst for nearly 18 years. Today he is founder and CEO of Cloudburst Technologies, a New York company that maps the off-chain human networks behind crypto fraud - the pump-and-dumps, pig-butchering rings, and market manipulation that live in forums and chatrooms rather than on the blockchain. Cloudburst raised a $7M Series A in 2025 backed by Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund, and In-Q-Tel.
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.
Alexandre Berkovic
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.
Vatsa Narasimha
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
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.
Rahul Raina
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.
Soups Ranjan
Soups Ranjan is the co-founder and CEO of Sardine, an agentic AI platform for financial crime prevention and AML compliance headquartered in San Francisco. With a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University and career stints at Coinbase (as Head of Risk) and Revolut (Head of Financial Crime), he channeled over 15 years of fraud-fighting expertise into Sardine, which has raised $145.6M and grown to 300+ enterprise customers. Sardine's behavioral biometrics and device intelligence platform now profiles 2.2+ billion devices, making it one of the most comprehensive financial crime databases in existence.
Nuno Sebastiao
Nuno Sebastiao is the Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Feedzai, the AI-native RiskOps platform protecting over $70 billion in annual payment volume across 190 countries. A former European Space Agency aerospace engineer turned fintech disruptor, he co-founded Feedzai in Portugal in 2011 alongside Paulo Marques and Pedro Bizarro. Under his leadership, Feedzai reached unicorn status in 2021, hit a $2 billion valuation in 2025, and was selected by the European Central Bank to power fraud detection for the digital euro. A multilingual polymath fluent in four languages, Nuno was ranked #1 in Portugal's 40 Under 40, named Entrepreneur of the Year by London Business School, and has shared stages with Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, and Richard Branson.
Tyler Allen
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.
Ari Tuchman
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
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.
Gabe Gotthard
Gabe Gotthard is the CEO of DataWalk Inc., a graph analytics and AI-powered investigation platform used by top U.S. and European banks, national security agencies, and defense organizations to detect fraud, money laundering, and organized crime. With over 33 years in enterprise IT - including a stint at 3ParData (acquired by HP for $2.5B) where he coined 'utility storage' - Gotthard now leads a Wrocław-born, Silicon Valley-validated company that has displaced Palantir at the U.S. Department of Justice and earned Ally Financial's 2023 Technology Disruptor Award. Based in Redwood City, California, he is building DataWalk into a leading global alternative to Palantir for government and financial-sector intelligence work.