Every start-up has an origin story. Vishal Marria’s is pretty dramatic.
It began when he was just nine years old, and was attacked by four men who held a knife to his neck in a raid on his father’s cash and carry store.
That traumatic moment sparked an interest in crime that took him into data analytics, and eventually the founding of Quantexa – a tech firm that’s been used by major banks and international police to “find the bad guys”, rooting out fraud, money laundering and more.
He’s built a company recently valued at 1 point 8 billion dollars, in just seven years.
In this episode:
- How that violent incident led to his interest in crime
- The problem he noticed working with financial companies’ data while working at EY
- How data is used to tackle financial and organised crime
- How he got an untested start-up into a room with a huge bank and won a major client against “some of the biggest tech companies on the planet”
- The nerve-wracking moment the wifi on a plane went down just as he was emailed the result of his presentation to HSBC
- How as an AI company they have to remember that “people buy from people”
- How Quantexa has evolved from “catching the bad guy” to “finding the good one”
Listen above, or wherever you stream your podcasts.
