SentiLink

SentiLink is the specialist's specialist: rather than a broad identity platform, it built a deep data product around synthetic-identity and first-party fraud — two of the fastest-growing and hardest-to-detect fraud types in US lending, where fabricated personas assembled from stolen or invented PII sail through traditional KYC undetected. Founded by two data scientists who built the risk function at Affirm, SentiLink analyzes the relationships between identity elements against its data network to surface fabrications that pass conventional checks, and US banks, credit unions, lenders, and fintechs rely on its Synthetic Fraud Score and First-Party Fraud Score at onboarding. The business is quietly excellent: reportedly bootstrapped-efficient with roughly $40M in 2024 ARR against only about $85M raised (a 2021 Series B led by Craft Ventures with a16z, Felicis, NYCA, and 9Yards), it added 50 customers in 2024 and doubled daily identity checks in early 2025, now verifying around 3 million identities a day and blocking tens of thousands of fraud attempts. Crucially, it keeps innovating on emerging threats — in 2024 it built detection for assumed-identity abuse, where fraudsters exploit the real identities of people who entered the US on temporary visas and departed. As synthetic identity balloons and generative AI makes fabricated personas easier to manufacture, a focused, capital-efficient data leader with proprietary signal and a track record of staying ahead of new fraud typologies is exactly the specialist banks cannot replace.