"Compliance is what enables a business to make money."

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Baran Ozkan has lived both sides of that statement: first inside a fintech company, buying compliance software and feeling how much it slowed the business down, and now as co-founder and CEO of Flagright, building the system he wishes he’d had.

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Born in Turkey, Baran studied engineering at Bilkent University and the University of South Florida, then moved through product roles at Florida Blue, Zalando, and Forto before immersing himself in the complexities of anti-money laundering at TransferGo. As Director of Product, Baran spent two years running a procurement process for transaction monitoring software. "I was extremely frustrated with that experience and saw a gap in the market,". He is candid that the road included a dead end. His first venture, an AI museum guide Audiotap, was a "failed" attempt that arrived before the technology was ready, a lesson he carried into everything that followed.

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In 2021, he founded Flagright with Madhu G. Nadig, a friend and former colleague, to build the system no one had made yet: an AI-native operating system for financial crime compliance. Y Combinator backed them, a $4.3 million seed round in 2025, followed by a $12.5M Series A in June 2026, and within four years, the company was serving 35 countries from offices in San Francisco, New York, Singapore, Bangalore and London. But geographic reach is not the same as trust, and in compliance, trust is the entire product.

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Compliance buyers do not take chances on vendors, because they are the ones answering to the regulator. "People across the board are open to trusting something if it can be evidenced, explainable and auditable so they can do their job, because in the end, it is their head on the line," Baran says. For a young startup, that is a hard bar to clear. His answer was to make the commitment visible. In 2024, Flagright moved its headquarters to Singapore, and Baran moved with it to run the APAC business in person. "It goes a long way when they can see the CEO is based in Singapore and we have an office" he says, "They see it as commitment."

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The future he describes is a compliance system that configures, runs, monitors, investigates and reports on itself, with people keeping the system in check. Flagright already runs infrastructure LLMs that attack its surface LLMs to try to disprove them; an AI audits the AI. "There is also an element of the market moving towards AI supervision rather than just doing something alongside AI," he says. "That is the future we are going towards."