Press Coverage and Brand Kit

Trisha was one of the early engineers at the online payments company, Affirm. She was involved in many of the original systems, including their general ledger and risk-related systems. 
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Clarence brought a deep background in machine learning and security. In fact, he wrote the O’Reilly book on that same topic, and is a lecturer at U.C. Berkeley on machine learning. 
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The two met at South Park Commons, a San Francisco-based community of builders, technologists, and domain-experts designed to foster great ideas and entrepreneurs. They bonded over a shared intuition that the fraud and anti-money laundering space was ripe for disruption, and set out to start a company. 
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They surveyed hundreds of experts in fraud and AML to validate their hypothesis and vision. Through those interviews, they met the Head of AML at eBay. When he heard what we they building, he invited them to participate in an RFP three weeks later. After Googling, “what is an rfp,” they worked night and day for the next three weeks to build out a fully functional prototype of their product.

Surprisingly, they ended up being one of the front-runners in the deal, largely due to the fact that their solution could involve any data in the detection of suspicious activity – not just transaction data – and the risk & compliance teams didn't need engineering to build or evolve their statistical models.

At that moment, they knew they were on to something, and founded Unit21 in July of 2018.