Trisha Kothari and the people waiting for permission

Asked what she would do if she could be born into her grandchildren’s generation, Trisha Kothari’s grandmother Barji had a brisk answer: “Oh, I’d definitely not get married. I would study and start a business.” Some family stories arrive wrapped in sentiment. This one came with a business plan.

Kothari grew up in India and went on to study engineering and computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. Years later, she and her siblings created a scholarship named for Barji and their other grandmother, Gulab. Their gift put a practical mechanism behind a family conviction: more women should have the chance to study computing and decide what to build.

The detail matters because Kothari’s career has repeatedly returned to the distance between knowing something and being allowed to do something about it. At Unit21, the company she co-founded in 2018, that distance became a software problem. People investigating suspicious financial activity understood their own businesses. Changing the tools they used could still require somebody else’s time, somebody else’s expertise, and a place in somebody else’s queue.

Her answer was to give those operators more control. The engineering involved was substantial; the argument beneath it was wonderfully ordinary. If someone carries responsibility for a result, it helps to let that person touch the machinery.

Ten engineers, and a very inventive adversary

Affirm was small when Kothari joined: roughly ten engineers, by her account. She helped build its original ledger and risk systems, then moved into product management. Her work put her close to the awkward meeting point between lending, identity, software and people who had no intention of repaying a loan.

In her telling, criminals exploited the lending model by using stolen identities to finance goods, receive them and resell them. The company could be left holding a loan that the real identity owner had never requested. A couch, innocuous enough in a living room, became part of a financial attack. Fraud has a gift for spoiling perfectly respectable furniture.

Kothari describes that period as an education in how creative and coordinated attackers could be. It also exposed an internal difficulty. Engineers had competing priorities; operations teams needed changes to keep up with what they were finding. The investigator’s discovery and the software team’s delivery schedule were separate events.

That is a useful place to locate her eventual company. Its premise did not require discovering that financial crime existed. It required noticing how the work of fighting it was organized. A person could recognize an emerging pattern and still lack a direct way to test a response. In that arrangement, every additional handoff gave the original insight another chance to lose its shape.

Her earlier experience included Google and LinkedIn, and her education included an exchange at ETH Zurich. But Affirm supplied the particular problem she kept working on. Engineering gave her a way to build; product management brought the question of whose working day the building should improve.

The invitation arrived before the company

After leaving Affirm, Kothari met Clarence Chio at South Park Commons in San Francisco. Chio brought experience in machine learning and security. They explored fraud and anti-money laundering together, contacting hundreds of specialists to test whether their instincts described a problem other people actually wanted solved.

One conversation produced an unusual invitation. The head of anti-money laundering at eBay was preparing a procurement process and offered them a final demonstration slot in three weeks. They had no company and no product. First, the two technical founders looked up what an RFP was. The acronym stood for request for proposal; in their case, it also stood for a rather abrupt deadline.

They built a prototype and presented it at eBay, accompanied by a former Affirm colleague so the team would look slightly larger. They were told they were front-runners. That interest helped establish conviction, rather than becoming a neat claim that eBay had signed a contract. Kothari dates the first funding to December 2018 and the launch to July 2019.

The episode is amusing because the outward signs of preparedness were so modest. A borrowed colleague cannot substitute for a useful product, but a useful product can sometimes get a hearing before the organization behind it looks conventional. The encounter gave the founders evidence that a different approach could compete for attention.

The concept was to accommodate the data a business actually had, rather than forcing every business into one fixed picture of a transaction. That flexibility placed domain knowledge closer to the controls. It also made the pitch more specific than an invitation to believe in another fraud-detection algorithm.

The first buyer has the hardest job

Winning attention and winning a customer were different tasks. Kothari’s account of the early sales process distinguishes objections to the product from reluctance to become its first buyer. In a business built around managing risk, taking a chance on an unproven supplier is a particularly awkward request.

Coinbase became Unit21’s first customer and Intuit its second. Kothari personally led sales through the first million dollars in revenue, with support from a business development representative. These were skills she had to acquire alongside the work of running a young company. Writing the software had not automatically taught her how to sell it.

She later cautioned founders about hiring a senior sales leader too early. A person accustomed to an established operation might have a very different skill set from someone able to move a startup from a few customers to a larger base. The useful question was what the candidate had actually built at the stage the company was in.

That advice has a certain unglamorous precision. Job titles can hide the difference between assembling a machine and operating one that already runs. Kothari’s own early selling put her in the assembly job. Customer hesitation became information she could use to work out which part of the proposition needed attention.

Inc. included her in its 2022 Female Founders list for helping fintech companies address money laundering. The recognition was public; the underlying work was less photogenic. Enterprise sales involves explaining, listening and explaining again. The person who understood the product had to learn which concerns a prospective buyer needed answered before a purchase could happen.

Let the investigator change the rule

Unit21’s original no-code proposition gave fraud and compliance teams a way to configure their own rules and workflows. The business user did not need to become an engineer to change what the system watched. Kothari made that control central to her explanation of the product.

In a 2023 discussion, she described a market in which fintech businesses differed through their products and customer experiences. A system built for one set of assumptions could fit another business poorly. Flexible data and configurable operations offered a way to account for those differences without rebuilding everything internally.

Her conversations about risk also extended beyond the moment an account was opened. Identity checks provide one view; what someone subsequently does provides another. Activity over time can carry information an onboarding decision cannot. That explains why monitoring and investigation occupied so much of the company’s attention.

A 2022 conversation with Jason Mikula covered Unit21’s learning from more than 230 discussions with fraud and anti-money laundering professionals. It returned to data silos and the value of allowing specialists to manage rules and models without depending on engineering support. The recurring subject was the investigator’s ability to work with the evidence.

The product argument is also an argument about respect for expertise. An operations team’s knowledge should have a usable route into the system. Software can make that route shorter, while the people using it still need to decide what a suspicious pattern means in the context of their business. A configurable tool earns its keep in those particulars.

A family gift with a working mechanism

The scholarship gave the same interest in opportunity a different setting. Announced for 2022, the Barji and Gulab Scholarship for Women in Computer Science at Waterloo was valued at $15,000 and aimed at a female student living in India entering the university’s computer science program.

Waterloo was a family choice with a concrete explanation. Kothari’s brother Aditya had studied there and benefited from its co-op experience. The family had seen what learning on the job could do for a student’s confidence and wanted women entering the field to have access to those opportunities too.

Kothari has described living with her grandmother until she was eighteen. The woman she remembers had little formal schooling, commanded respect within the family and insisted on education for the children. Her example was specific: directness, honesty and a willingness to resist expectations that did not deserve obedience.

Kothari says she has tried to bring those qualities into Unit21’s culture. That makes the family influence more tangible than a ceremonial acknowledgment of inspiration. It concerns how people speak, which expectations they accept and how seriously they take the ambitions of others.

The scholarship is a particularly apt tribute to an unrealized wish to study and start a business. It cannot give a grandmother a second childhood. It can help a student begin with choices that the grandmother had wanted. There is something pleasingly practical about honoring an opinion by paying for someone to act on it.

“She was a strong, intelligent, hard-working, sassy matriarch.”Kothari, on her grandmother

From the desert to the chairman’s chair

When Kothari announced her move to founder and chairman in April 2026, she included a photograph from Unit21’s first company trip to Zion National Park. Tyler Allen, who would succeed her as CEO, stood at the far right. A group of colleagues with hiking poles makes an unusually useful succession photograph: the next leader was already in the frame.

Allen joined as the company’s first employee and founding software engineer in 2019. The April 6 announcement described his later work leading its AI strategy and rebuilding the platform around AI agents. Kothari’s responsibilities as chairman include long-term strategic vision and important strategic relationships.

The transition follows a shift in the company’s tools, from helping operators configure work to using AI agents to carry out investigative tasks. Those tools raise fresh questions about how people inspect and control the work being done on their behalf. The original interest in giving practitioners useful machinery remains a relevant test.

Kothari has called building Unit21 the defining work of her career so far. The phrase leaves room for what comes next without pretending the earlier years were merely preparation. She built the company, learned to sell its product, helped establish its customers and handed the CEO role to someone who had worked on its foundations.

Behind that professional sequence sits Barji’s wonderfully decisive answer. Study. Start a business. Make use of the choices available to you. Kothari has done both, then put some of her attention into making those choices available to other people. The machinery changes; that family instruction has held up rather well.