Neha Narkhede founded the NASDAQ-listed Confluent, a $10 billion real-time data streaming platform. Sachin Kulkarni developed distributed systems that powered Meta’s risk management systems over 11 years. They also happen to be wife and husband, respectively.
Together, they co-founded Oscilar, to develop “the most advanced AI Risk Decisioning platform,” which emerged from stealth status last year. Founded in 2021, Oscilar tackles the risks of online transactions such as loan defaults and fraud involved with things like financial transactions and insurance using artificial intelligence.
Narkhede and Kulkarni have funded the new company themselves with $20 million, Forbes reported, and have staffed it with around two dozen hires, and have already signed up dozens of customers, which are mostly fintech firms.
“The key benefit is that we remove the need for a company to use engineers for risk assessment since no coding is required,” Narkhede told Forbes. “Businesses decide ahead of time what data they want to be analyzing, and we set up the programming to ensure our AI technology brings in the data to advise on the risk of every transaction, leaving it to the risk analysts so they run tests and approve tweaks to the model.”
Narkhede is an accomplished engineer and one of America’s richest self-made women, according to Forbes, currently worth about $475 million. In 2014, she founded Confluent, which helps organizations process large amounts of data using Apache Kafka, an open source messaging system she co-created while previously working at LinkedIn. At its height Confluent had a market capitalization of $24.75 billion before the stock plunged 77 percent.
Oscilar will be competing with the likes of DataVisor, Provenir, Sift, Alloy, along with giants such as Google. As a risk-detecting model, Oscilar uses a combination of data and a machine-learning algorithm. In a lengthy blog post, chief product officer Saurabh Bajaj wrote that Oscilar’s AI Risk Decisioning platform is about “reimagining” the approach to digital identity and user behavior analysis.
Earlier this year, Socure’s digital identity consortium data was integrated with Oscilar’s risk management platform to strengthen fraud prevention and risk management for the financial sector.
“Our Cognitive Digital Identity Intelligence Platform doesn’t just stop at detection,” he writes, “it seamlessly feeds rich digital identity and behavioral intelligence into our entire AI Risk Decisioning platform.”
In the same blog post, Bajaj elaborated on “Cognitive Signatures” and this goes beyond basic device fingerprint, outlining “three core innovations.” These are Contextual Cognitive Signatures, which analyze thousands of unique digital markers across network, device and behavioral layers to create an identity signature that is impossible to replicate even with advanced AI tools, according to Oscilar.
The second is Security-First Architecture that emphasized the inability of fraudsters to reverse engineer Oscilar’s system. And the last so-called innovation is Real-Time Intelligence at Scale, which includes “advanced ML [machine learning] models that continuously adapt to new attack patterns.”
Article Topics
behavioral analysis | digital identity | fintech | fraud prevention | identity verification | Oscilar | Socure
