AJ Asver is the founder and CEO of Parcha, the San Francisco startup behind Grep, an AI 'expert engine' for serious business research and due diligence. A four-time founder, Oxford computer scientist and former DJ, he sold his first company to Google at 25, then built fintech products at Coinbase and Brex before spending six months teaching himself modern AI and launching Parcha in 2023 with a $5M seed round. Parcha cut its teeth automating compliance for fintechs like Airwallex and Flutterwave, then pivoted into Grep, pitched as 'the MacBook Pro of AI - a place where serious work gets done.'
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.
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.
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.
Trulioo is a Vancouver-based global identity platform that helps banks, fintechs, marketplaces and crypto firms verify both people and businesses in seconds. Through a single API it combines KYC, KYB, AML watchlist screening, document and biometric verification, and credit decisioning, drawing on data sources that reach billions of people and hundreds of millions of businesses worldwide. The pitch is simple: prove who - and what - you are dealing with, anywhere on earth, without stitching together a dozen regional vendors.
Middesk is a San Francisco-based business identity platform that helps banks, fintechs, lenders, and marketplaces verify the businesses they transact with. Its KYB APIs turn the slow, paper-heavy process of vetting a company into a real-time decision, powering onboarding at firms like Brex, Plaid, Mercury, Gusto, Affirm, and Shopify.
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.
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.
Persona is a San Francisco-based identity infrastructure company that helps businesses verify people - and increasingly, AI agents - online. Its configurable platform powers KYC, KYB, AML, age verification, and ongoing trust-and-safety workflows for fintechs, marketplaces, crypto exchanges, and AI platforms across 200+ countries.
Leo Patching is a serial fintech entrepreneur and the CEO and co-founder of Kompliant, a compliance orchestration platform for banks, payment facilitators, and financial institutions that was acquired by LegitScript in October 2025. With a track record spanning from solar energy to payments infrastructure, Patching has built a career around turning regulation into a competitive advantage - arguing that compliance is not a cost center but a growth engine for the modern financial services industry.
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.