As institutional interest in crypto and blockchain technologies grows, so does the need for compliance tooling that can meet enterprise standards. Global expectations are beginning to formalize, but much of the existing compliance infrastructure falls short. Adoption of these assets hinges on robust compliance tools that can keep pace with the speed and complexity of on-chain innovation.

At General Catalyst, we believe the foundations of next-generation financial systems must be built on transparency, trust, and rigor. That’s why we’re proud to co-lead CipherOwl’s seed round alongside Coinbase, Road Capital and a select group of angel investors. CipherOwl is building intelligent compliance infrastructure for the digital asset ecosystem, giving enterprises and regulators the tools to interpret blockchain data.

Solving the Compliance Gap in Digital Finance

Regulators around the world are increasingly developing expectations for digital-asset custody, transaction monitoring, and counterparty due diligence. Legacy tools designed for traditional finance often fall short when applied to blockchain environments. CipherOwl addresses this gap with its on-chain compliance platform, which includes features such as Know-Your-Transaction (KYT) APIs that provide explainable, real-time decisions for on-chain transactions.

By combining AI-driven insights with a focus on data accuracy and traceability in the crypto intelligence layer, CipherOwl streamlines investigations and reduces the manual burden for compliance teams. For example, teams can complete evidence reports in 20 seconds instead of 20 minutes, a 60x improvement in efficiency. Instead of relying on siloed dashboards and spreadsheets, CipherOwl users gain direct visibility into the underlying activity of each transaction.

Building for Enterprise from Day One

What we think sets CipherOwl apart is its commitment to enterprise-grade infrastructure. Since its inception, the team has prioritized integration and reliability, ensuring that its solutions can plug into existing workflows and scale alongside institutional needs. Whether supporting a financial institution monitoring risk exposure or a regulator mapping illicit activity, CipherOwl enables confident, compliant engagement with digital assets.

The team is led by founders Leo Liang and Ming Jiang, who previously led data and on-chain compliance product at Coinbase. The crypto-native company plans to deepen its use of AI to further automate and enhance compliance workflows. 

Our Conversation with Leo and Ming

We sat down with Leo and Ming to learn more about their vision for the future of the digital asset ecosystem. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What conventional thinking are you challenging, and why?

We're challenging two failed assumptions in on-chain compliance: First, that compliance is a bolt-on dashboard. Second, that black-box vendor intelligence is privileged and deserves trust.

We think on-chain compliance should be a scalable data application built on an intelligence layer. This architecture produces machine-readable, auditable decisions that both humans and agents can verify, ensuring identical evidence yields identical outcomes across all chains.

This fundamentally shifts the business model from charging per seat to monetizing the operational costs we eliminate. It's also the only architecture robust enough to safely scale next-generation financial infrastructure.

What have been your most important lessons around execution so far?

The numbers tell the story. A typical on-chain compliance system handling 10k daily transactions generates 500 alarms daily. When volume 10x's, budgets don't. There already aren't enough qualified investigators today, let alone for the 100x transaction volume coming by 2030.

Most teams discover this through painful trial and error. In-house builds consume 8-12 engineering months upfront, then 3-4 FTEs permanently for maintenance. Legacy vendors just scale headcount linearly—their average enterprise client employs 10+ analysts to review alerts, with 95%+ being false positives.

We took a different path: build AI-native from day one. Our deterministic decision engine processes 1M+ transactions with 100% consistency. We ship weekly based on customer feedback, not quarterly. New chain support takes weeks, not months.

From a technical standpoint, what’s novel or fresh about how you’re building?

Chain-agnostic normalization: We convert fragmented blockchain data, which comes in different formats, schemas, and protocols, into unified semantic objects. 

Full decision replay: Every compliance decision can be reconstructed transaction by transaction, wallet by wallet. Not just audit logs but actual deterministic replay of the entire decision tree. Same inputs always produce identical outputs, even months later.

Human-AI shared evidence: Our system produces structured reasoning artifacts that both AI agents and human investigators can read, verify, and act upon. There are no black boxes: every decision links to specific on-chain evidence that anyone can validate.

Compliance as code: Instead of bolt-on dashboards, we built a control plane that treats compliance as a distributed knowledge systems problem. Sub-10ms latency, horizontal scaling, and API-first for both human and autonomous consumers.

What impact do you want this company to have on the world?

We're building the intelligence layer for on-chain finance. We want to make on-chain trust instant and automatic, eliminating the massive operational costs institutions currently bear while scaling the on-chain intelligence market 100x.

Ultimately, we want to see a world where value moves as freely as information, yet more safely than traditional banking. Where any developer can build financial products that work globally and compliance enhances innovation instead of blocking it. This happens when humans and agents share the same deterministic ground truth.