fraud-prevention
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Jonathan Awad Is Teaching Finance to Trust Strangers Again
His parents arrived in America without a file that could vouch for them. Decades later, the Baselayer co-founder is building the machinery that decides which businesses - and now which AI agents - deserve to be believed.
Tamas Kadar Turned a Week of Chargebacks Into a Global Fraud-Fighting Company
A university crypto experiment lost half its revenue to fraud in a single week. Kadar and his co-founder answered by building the defense they could not buy - then spent the next nine years turning it into SEON.
Julie O’Brien Makes Complicated Technology Feel Like a Human Conversation
Across Cisco, Box, Nutanix, AttackIQ, Dazz and now Feedzai, Julie O’Brien has practiced the same useful art: turning dense enterprise technology into a story people can carry into the next room.
Colton Pond Is Turning Fintech Marketing Into a Contact Sport
He built a fintech conference in a salt desert, another around operator guilds, and now markets the invisible machinery that decides whether a digital identity can be trusted. His method is simple to describe and difficult to imitate: learn obsessively, gather the right people, and make the room useful.
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.
Frank Moreno Is Marketing the Moment Your Bank Decides to Trust You
After two decades marketing enterprise software, Entersekt’s CMO has landed on a wonderfully awkward product: the split-second decision between a smooth payment and a suspicious one.
Ashley Kiolbasa Is Selling the Internet Its Missing Ingredient: Trust
After a career spent translating cybersecurity, ecommerce fraud and frictionless checkout, Prove's CMO has arrived at the question underneath them all: in an AI-shaped internet, how does a business know who - or what - is on the other side?
Tracey Weinberg Wants Telecom to Stop Treating Payments Like Plumbing
After years marketing the machinery behind digital commerce, the Vesta executive has a blunt thesis: approval rates deserve the same attention as customer acquisition. A single percentage point can be worth $300,000 a year to a 100,000-subscriber operator.
Brian Maughan Is Making the Invisible Machinery of Homeownership Visible
He spent two decades turning title insurance from closing-table paperwork into a product, a platform and, lately, a story worth hearing. His playbook is simple: make trust easier to use, then show people why it matters.
Oluwatobiloba Ololade Is Building the Boring Layer the Internet Cannot Live Without
The Dojah co-founder turned a developer’s recurring nuisance - fragmented access to identity data - into infrastructure for businesses that need to know who is really on the other side of a screen.
Alberto Rosas Is Building Trust for an Internet Full of Doubles
An identical twin who once competed at tennis and trained neural networks now runs live identity checks for a living. His second act is a study in narrowing the problem without shrinking the ambition.
Johnny Ayers Is Still Punting Into the Unknown
He fumbled the snap in his first college game, ran out of startup money four times, and kept moving forward. Fourteen years into Socure, Johnny Ayers is widening his bet on who - and what - the internet can trust.
Vijay Balasubramaniyan Is Teaching Machines to Hear the Lie
A declined credit card sent a Georgia Tech researcher hunting for truth in the noise. Fifteen years later, his old question - who is really speaking? - has become the defining riddle of synthetic media.
Chirag Bakshi Built a Career on the Signals Hiding in Plain Sight
From telephone switches and Apple printers to mobile identity, the Zumigo founder has spent four decades turning quiet infrastructure into practical trust.
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.
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.
Ido Ben-Natan
Ido Ben-Natan is the co-founder and CEO of Blockaid, a blockchain security company that protects crypto wallets, apps and users from scams and onchain exploits in real time. A veteran of Israel's Unit 8200 and the Office of the Prime Minister, where he led a cyber security R&D team and won the Israel Defense Prize, he launched Blockaid in 2022 to bring nation-state defensive expertise to Web3. The company is trusted by Coinbase, MetaMask, Kraken, Uniswap and Stellar, and has raised roughly $89 million from investors including Ribbit Capital, Sequoia, GV and Greylock.
Jeff Maynard
Jeff Maynard is the founder, president, and CEO of Biometric Signature ID, the Texas company behind BioSig-ID, a software-only biometric password that people draw with a finger or mouse instead of typing. He conceived the idea while running a publicly traded biometrics firm and funded its development for two years before launching the company with his wife Cindy in 2007. His gesture biometrics technology has been used tens of millions of times across 95 countries, holds multiple U.S. patents, and was selected by the White House to pilot the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace.
Milind Borkar
Milind Borkar is the founder and CEO of Illuma, a Plano, Texas company that uses passive voice biometrics and synthetic-voice detection to authenticate callers and stop phone-channel fraud at credit unions and community banks. He holds a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Tech, is named on 21 patents, and spent a decade at Texas Instruments launching more than 50 products before founding Illuma in 2016.
Shai Gabay
Shai Gabay is co-founder and CEO of Trustmi, an end-to-end B2B payment security platform he started in 2021 with Eli Ben-Nun. Trustmi uses behavioral AI to catch business payment fraud, vendor impersonation and process errors in real time. Gabay was an amateur hacker at 13, served in Israel's Unit 8200, and before Trustmi ran security and product for banks and cyber companies including Discount Bank, Cyberbit, Cynet and Opera.
Diego Asenjo
Diego Asenjo is the CEO and co-founder of Mesh, an Austin-based B2B identity startup that verifies the legitimacy, licensing, insurance, and compliance of small businesses and sole proprietors in real time. A former Amazon product leader who built Business Prime into a multi-billion-dollar program, Diego left to fix a problem he 'could not unsee': the broken data infrastructure that quietly penalizes new, small, and micro businesses. His mission is personal, rooted in watching his father's small auto-parts shop in Argentina lose access to fair credit and opportunity as commerce went digital. Mesh raised a $5.7M seed round led by Greycroft and reports 99%+ satisfaction from the businesses it verifies.
Raul Popa
Raul Popa is the co-founder and CEO of TypingDNA, a behavioral biometrics company that recognizes people by the rhythm of how they type. A self-taught coder turned sociology-and-statistics graduate, he turned keystroke dynamics into a commercial authentication API used in banking, finance, and online education. He started the company alone in 2016 in Romania, brought it through Techstars and a Google-AI-backed Series A, and relocated it to New York just before the pandemic. Beyond enterprise security, he shipped TypingDNA Focus, a free app that predicts your mood from your typing.
Michael Walsh
Michael Walsh ran CyberSource for the decade that turned a quiet payment gateway into a $2 billion mouthful for Visa. He joined in 1998, took North American sales in 2000, ran global sales by 2004, became CEO in January 2010, and closed the Visa deal months later. He had already engineered the $660 million scoop of Authorize.Net in 2007. Now an advisor and board director, he is the kind of operator who reads quietly and signs loudly.
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.
Anisa Kumar
Anisa Kumar is the CEO of Narvar, a retail technology platform serving 1,500+ global brands with AI-powered post-purchase experiences. With over 23 years across Target, Walmart.com, and Levi Strauss where she helped lead the company's IPO, she became Narvar's Chief Customer Officer in 2021 and was elevated to CEO in October 2024. Under her leadership, Narvar launched its IRIS AI engine - analyzing 42-74 billion consumer interactions annually - to transform the moment after checkout from a cost center into a growth engine.
Emily Garza
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
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.
Maxwell Blumenfeld
Maxwell Blumenfeld is the Co-Founder, COO, and Head of R&D at SentiLink, a San Francisco-based identity verification and fraud prevention company he co-founded in 2017 with Naftali Harris after both worked as risk leaders at Affirm. Discovering that synthetic identities with real 750+ credit scores were slipping through the financial system, they built SentiLink into a platform now serving 300+ financial institutions - including three of the top 10 US banks - having verified several hundred million applications. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2020, Blumenfeld holds a mathematics and economics degree from the University of Chicago and operates from Austin, Texas.