fraud-detection
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Anant Kale Put AI on Expense Duty. Then the Receipts Got Weird.
Anant Kale built AppZen around an unfashionable question: who checks the paperwork after software makes it easy to submit? Fourteen years later, that question sits at the center of the argument over AI, judgment and the future of finance work.
Ronan Burke Is Teaching AI to Read the Fine Print
A childhood Silicon Valley poster, a frustrating bank application and one well-timed pivot led Ronan Burke from southwest Ireland to the strange new frontier of AI-made paperwork.
Musheer Ahmed Is Moving Healthcare’s Error Check to the Moment Before the Bill
A cybersecurity dissertation became an Atlanta company with a precise thesis: the cheapest claim error is the one that never enters the system. Now Ahmed is pushing payment integrity from forensic cleanup toward prevention at “Point Zero.”
Mike Schrobo Is Giving Every Ad Click a Background Check
After two decades buying digital attention, Mike Schrobo decided the receipt could not be trusted. Fraud Blocker is his attempt to separate customers from bots before bad clicks become bad business decisions.
Eli Wachs
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.
Johan Brissmyr
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.
Rahul Pangam
Rahul Pangam is the co-founder and CEO of RapidCanvas, an Austin-based enterprise AI platform that pairs autonomous AI agents with human data scientists to help non-technical business teams build and deploy models. A serial founder, he previously co-founded Simility, a fraud detection platform PayPal acquired for roughly $120M in 2018, and spent years running Trust and Safety operations at Google.
Abuzar Royesh
Abuzar Royesh is the founder and CEO of Pastel (DataServe AI), a U.S.- and Nigeria-based company building agentic AI software that helps regional, mid-tier, and community banks automate onboarding, compliance, fraud detection, and anti-money-laundering work. Born in Afghanistan and educated at Tufts and Stanford, where he was a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, he is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree. He is also the founder and board chair of the 30 Birds Foundation, which evacuated more than 450 Afghans, mainly schoolgirls, after the 2021 Taliban takeover.
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.
Brian Silverstein
Brian Silverstein is the founder and CEO of MirrorTab, a San Francisco cybersecurity company that treats the browser as the new battleground and tries to take it off the table entirely. Using server-side isolation, MirrorTab strips the client-side attack surface so malware, malicious extensions, and bots never touch the real code, data, or APIs behind a web session. Before MirrorTab he was an early co-founder and CTO of Honey, the shopping-rewards browser extension acquired by PayPal, and an engineer at Apple, Nest, Broadcom, and Freescale. A Cornell-trained electrical engineer with eight patents, he raised an $8.5M seed in 2025 led by Valley Capital Partners with GV and others.
Idan Bar-Dov
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.
Michael Manapat
Michael Manapat is the co-founder and CEO of Rowspace, an AI platform that turns a finance firm's proprietary data into compounding decision-making edge. He built the machine learning behind Stripe Radar, the fraud engine that scans every card payment across the Stripe network, then spent three and a half years as CTO of Notion driving its push into AI. A mathematics PhD from MIT and former Google engineer, he launched Rowspace in February 2026 with $50M backed by Sequoia and Emergence Capital, already serving roughly ten top private equity and credit firms managing hundreds of billions in assets.
Dennis Chang
Dennis Chang is the co-founder and CEO of RoadFlex, a Visa fuel and expense card built for the unglamorous fleets that keep America moving - HVAC vans, landscaping trucks, delivery rigs. A Taiwanese-Peruvian who grew up in Lima and trades in three languages, he studied materials science and management engineering at Stanford, consulted at McKinsey, co-founded an AI grid-inspection startup, and spent years as a venture investor before deciding the most interesting problem in fintech was hiding at the gas pump: fuel fraud. RoadFlex pairs real-time transaction controls and telematics validation to stop a driver from filling a personal pickup on the company dime.
Maite Telleria
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.
Andre Ferraz
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.
Cesar Pino
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
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.
Naftali Harris
Naftali Harris is the Co-Founder and CEO of SentiLink, a San Francisco-based identity verification and fraud prevention company that helps over 400 financial institutions - including 10 of the 15 largest U.S. banks - detect synthetic identities and application fraud in real time. A Stanford-trained statistician who left his PhD program to become Affirm's first data scientist, Harris co-founded SentiLink in 2017 after seeing sophisticated fraud schemes up close. The company has raised $84 million in total funding, verifies over 3 million identities daily, and has been recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 and American Banker's 2024 Innovators of the Year.
Ofer Feldman
Ofer Feldman is the Co-Founder and CTO of Stampli, a Mountain View-based AI-powered accounts payable automation company he co-founded with his brother Eyal Feldman in 2015. A computer engineer by training from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Ofer spent over a decade building software across defense, enterprise, and healthcare sectors before channeling that depth into Stampli. Under his technical leadership, Stampli has grown to process over $100 billion in invoices annually for 1,600+ businesses, raised $145.7 million in total funding including a $61M Series D led by Blackstone in 2023, and pioneered Cognitive AI that brings human-level PO matching to finance teams worldwide.
Oren Kaniel
Oren Kaniel is the CEO and co-founder of AppsFlyer, the world's leading mobile attribution and marketing analytics platform. Starting from a small apartment in 2011, he and co-founder Reshef Mann built a $2 billion company that serves 12,000+ customers including Nike, eBay, and Macy's. AppsFlyer reached $508.4M ARR in 2024, its first profitable year, and is positioning for a potential IPO. A Technion computer science graduate who started coding at age 8, Kaniel is known for spending 1.5 years without salary to build AppsFlyer and for operating the company for six years without a dedicated sales team.
Shawn Lane
Shawn Lane is the Chief Executive Officer of Ottimate, an AI-powered accounts payable automation and payments platform serving mid-market businesses across hospitality, healthcare, construction, retail, and manufacturing. With more than 30 years of experience scaling enterprise SaaS and supply chain software companies - from Procter & Gamble to i2 Technologies to E2open - Lane brings rare operational depth to one of fintech's fastest-growing categories. His career is a through-line of companies that challenged legacy processes with intelligent automation, and Ottimate is his biggest stage yet.
Sherman Ye
Sherman Ye is the Founder and CEO of NebulaGraph (vesoft Inc.), the company behind one of the world's most scalable open-source distributed graph databases. After engineering stints at Facebook and Ant Financial — where he worked directly on graph database infrastructure — Ye founded vesoft in 2018 to bring enterprise-grade graph database technology to a market hungry for connected-data insights. NebulaGraph can handle trillions of edges with millisecond latency, and counts Tencent, Meituan, and JD Digits among its users. Ye led the company through a $8M pre-A round in 2020 and a Series A in 2022 led by Jeneration Capital, while pioneering the GraphRAG concept that merges knowledge graphs with large language models.
Zahid Shaikh
Zahid Shaikh is the Co-Founder and Head of Risk Products at Sardine, an AI-powered fraud and compliance platform that has raised $145.6M in total funding. Previously a top inventor at PayPal where his device intelligence product saved the company $40M+ annually in fraud losses, Zahid then led risk and security product teams at Uber and Revolut before co-founding Sardine in April 2020 alongside Soups Ranjan and Aditya Goel. Sardine now profiles 2.2+ billion devices and achieved 130% YoY ARR growth in 2024.
Alok Aggarwal
Dr. Alok Aggarwal is the CEO and Chief Data Scientist of Scry AI, a San Jose-based enterprise AI company he founded in 2014. A Johns Hopkins PhD with deep roots at IBM Research and as co-founder of Evalueserve - where he coined the term 'Knowledge Process Outsourcing' - Aggarwal has spent four decades building AI systems that actually work in regulated industries. His 2023 book 'The Fourth Industrial Revolution & 100 Years of AI (1950-2050)' topped Amazon bestseller charts in multiple categories. Scry AI serves banking, insurance, manufacturing, and government clients with explainable, audit-ready AI deployed on 60+ proprietary models.
Eyal Feldman
Eyal Feldman is the co-founder and CEO of Stampli, the Mountain View-based AI-powered accounts payable automation platform that processes over $100 billion in annual invoices for 1,700+ enterprises. A former SAP implementation specialist turned fintech founder, Feldman built Stampli around a simple belief: that AP should be a collaborative process, not a bureaucratic bottleneck. Under his leadership, Stampli has raised $145.7M in total funding, earned the #10 Best CEO of 2024 recognition from Comparably, and become a G2 Leader in 9 categories for AP automation software.
Maxx Lobo
Maxx Lobo is the Chief Executive Officer of Ask Media Group, the IAC-owned digital media and performance marketing company behind Ask.com and other properties reaching 245 million people monthly. A two-decade veteran of ad-tech, cloud infrastructure, and digital media, Lobo rose through the ranks as CTO and COO/President before taking the top role in 2025. Under his operational leadership, Ask Media Group tripled its EBITDA from $50 million to over $100 million in four years, cementing his reputation as one of the more quietly effective operators in the digital media landscape.
Thanh Tran
Thanh Tran is Co-CEO of A5 Labs, a Foster City-based AI company building game integrity infrastructure for competitive online gaming. With a PhD in Computer Science from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and a background scaling Upwork's data science team through its IPO, he now leads a 180-person team applying deep reinforcement learning, blockchain reputation systems, and real-time behavioral analytics to eliminate bots, collusion, and cheating from online poker and beyond.
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.
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.
Marc Friend
Marc Friend is the CEO of Sift, the leading digital trust and fraud prevention platform serving 700+ global enterprises. A Silicon Valley veteran with 30+ years spanning venture capital (US Venture Partners, Summit Partners, Partech) and operational CFO/CEO roles at high-growth tech companies including PubNub, Sun Basket, and Rapid (sold to Nokia in 2024), Friend brings an unusually broad toolkit to the fraud-detection space. He also competes in Ironman triathlons and funded an annual full-tuition merit scholarship at MIT, his alma mater.