“We’re Cobalt ID. We use AI and graph analysis to stop business fraud for banks and lenders. We’re really good at catching fraud rings and shell company schemes that legacy solutions consistently miss.”

“I’ve always loved impossible problems. I think that it was really the chance to solve a really hard problem with real impact that also first originally drew me to tech in the first place. 

Now, when it comes to fraud and identity, I first saw the problem when working on financial inclusion at Google.

I saw how fraud basically got in the way of our team wanting to build some more of the bigger and more ambitious things we wanted to do. We needed to put all of these controls into place that not only added a lot of friction for good users and caused them to drop off, but at the end of the day, were not really that effective in preventing bad actors from getting access to the platform anyway. It was sort of a lose-lose situation. 

And later I went on to work on self-driving at Waymo, and this was kind of when it hit me that if we can make cars drive themselves, we can absolutely solve fraud and identity.

And so that was in 2021, and I pretty much zoned in from there.”

“Our first customers came from conferences, word-of-mouth, and warm intros. But we would go to conferences and just approach random people. It worked incredibly well. Maybe because I’m Canadian and I’m aggressively friendly.

It was hard because fraud teams are super skeptical. They’ve been promised a million solutions in the past and let down every single time.

But they also care deeply about the problem. That means that they were willing to provide us a lot of early feedback which helped shape the product.

Also, talking to them taught us how to build trust. Being super specific about the problem, and using industry jargon that only insiders understood – like fraud rings and shell company schemes – really helped people take us more seriously early on.”

“Founders get tons of advice, and a lot of it sounds good – like the classic ‘sell before you build.’ But, for our space, that wasn’t very helpful advice. We were solving a problem with mostly technical risk, so trying to sell the idea before it worked was a waste of time. If you’re solving a problem with technical risk, like we are, the reaction you’ll get is ‘obviously, if it works, I’ll buy it.’ You don’t need to prove demand – you need to prove it works.”

“(laughs) I can't pretend to be sane through all of this, but honestly, going on walks is still the most effective thing for me. It helps me stay sane. It's just incredibly helpful if I'm stuck on a really hard problem. And I think walks are also where I tend to think of some of my best ideas.

So I try to go on a couple of walks every day. Sometimes I will do the walking one-on-one as well, which even if I'm talking while walking, it still kind of gets the juices flowing.”

“People are usually surprised to learn that I grew up playing baseball and squash. I actually pitched and played third base. I’ve always preferred intramural sports over the gym – though that’s tougher to keep up with in New York. Walking is up there too, but sports have always been my favorite way to work out.”

“I am a big restaurant person, especially in New York. I love my New York food. I think I have a few oldies, but goodies I always go back to. I'll give you a pizza one – Rubirosa.”

“So I grew up in a boring suburb, near Toronto. And with that came kind of the itch to try living in as many places as I could. Luckily, I went to an undergrad school that let me move around and work at the same time. And so a lot of the exploration I did in my early adult life was living in as many different places as I could to figure out I liked to live the best. And New York kind of came out on top for a couple of different reasons.

There was kind of a gravitational pull over the years. Many of my close friends and people that I care about in my life have moved either to New York or very close by. But I think the two other things is that – one, is just the sheer diversity of things to do and people to meet and hobbies to have. But the other is, because of that, you can be exactly who you are and like exactly what you like and still find community around you, no matter what that looks like. And that's a very rare, New York-specific trait I think.”

“Not to quote business school, but… one of my professors once drew a two-by-two matrix that really stuck with me: standards on one axis, care on the other. 

If you have high standards but low care, no one wants to work for you.
If you have low standards and low care, why are we even talking about it? 
If you have low standards and high care, people will think you're really nice, but not necessarily someone they want to work for.

And so I think, like, the right way to think about it is to have high standards but also high care.

And so when it comes to the not-nice things that we're talking about, I really don't pull any punches when it comes to expectations and being really firm on what I think is important and where we can't afford to skimp. But I also deeply care about everyone that I work with and make sure that comes through as kind of a counterbalance.

I think that ends up really helping – like, hey, if this isn't working, how are we approaching this together? Because I really care about making sure we're both successful in this.”

“Our company is going really fast right now, and so we're trying to grow our engineering team to keep up. We’re especially looking for backend-leaning full-stack engineers in New York with experience productionizing zero-to-one systems. If you’re excited about tackling unsolved problems at scale, we’d love to hear from you.”

If this sounds like you or someone you know, reach out at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

Priya Murali is the co-founder and CEO of Cobalt ID, a startup in the fraud space that uses AI to prevent business fraud for commercial banks and lenders. She’s been focused on the space since 2021, and formally launched Cobalt ID a little over a year ago. She has been a member of NYC Founders Club since our launch last year.