risk-operations
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bluCognition and the hidden life of a bank statement
A small business leaves clues in every deposit, payment and suspiciously tidy PDF. bluCognition turns those clues into evidence lenders can use - and now adds commercial credit history to the picture.
May Mitchell Built a Career on the Power of Three
A computer-science graduate wandered into sales, learned to make partners part of the plan and spent 25 years giving cybersecurity a language customers could use. At Qualys, her old rule still applies: choose three priorities, then move.
Qualys Wants to Turn the World's Vulnerability Backlog Into a To-Do List
The 27-year-old security company helped put vulnerability scanning in the cloud. Now it is selling a harder idea: that one agent and one risk score can tell sprawling enterprises what to fix first - and help fix it.
Footprint
Footprint is a New York-based identity and risk-operations company that unifies KYC, KYB, fraud detection, authentication, and secure data vaulting into a single platform for banks, fintechs, and marketplaces. Founded in 2022 by Eli Wachs and Alex Grinman, it aims to make verified identity portable across the internet - so a person proves who they are once and reuses that verification everywhere - while using AI agents (its Percy product) to automate manual fraud and compliance review.
Pranjal Daga
Pranjal Daga is the co-founder and CEO of Accend (YC S23), a San Francisco fintech building human-in-the-loop AI agents for commercial credit underwriting and compliance at banks and fintechs. Before Accend he led AI product on the Risk team at Brex, where his work helped prevent roughly $20M in fraud losses, and earlier helped build Cisco Innovation Labs from a single person to a 35-person team. He dropped out of a PhD in AI/ML at Purdue to chase the build, has done research at Adobe and IBM, and is racing to replace slow, manual back-office compliance work with audit-ready AI.
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.