CipherOwl, a San Francisco-based defense and compliance technology firm founded by former Coinbase executives, has come out of stealth with $15 million in seed funding. The funding round was jointly led by General Catalyst and Flourish Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Sancus Ventures, Enlight Capital, OKX Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Road Capital, and Predictive VC.
The company’s mission is to build a native AI layer that enables financial institutions to automate and audit blockchain compliance at scale. The CipherOwl platform turns raw blockchain data into interpretable, evidence-backed decisions for regulatory reporting and internal oversight – solving one of the biggest bottlenecks in institutional cryptocurrency adoption: compliance scalability.
CipherOwl’s technology is designed to address the increasing complexity of blockchain compliance as cross-chain transactions grow globally. Its platform uses an AI-driven “SR3 stack” (screening, inference, reporting, and research) that automates the compliance process from start to finish – from transaction screening and risk detection to audit-ready reporting.
The system’s AI orchestration layer ensures that all actions and outcomes are explainable, repeatable, and ready to be orchestrated, helping organizations keep pace with the explosion in cross-chain transaction activity.
The company’s founders, CEO Liu Liang and COO Ming Jiang, previously led data infrastructure and compliance on the Coinbase chain. Their team has already attracted major institutional customers, including Coinbase, OKX, 0x, Cobo, and Story Protocol, with deployments supporting production workloads such as regulatory audits and board reports.
The launch of CipherOwl comes at a pivotal moment for the digital assets industry. With governments and regulators around the world demanding the same AML and counter-terrorism standards as traditional finance, automating compliance has become a mission-critical task. The company’s technology positions it to play a central role as financial institutions and payment providers move toward native AI operations integrated with blockchain technology.
How the funding will be used: The funding will be used to accelerate hiring in engineering and compliance fields, expand support for additional blockchain networks, and strengthen enterprise partnerships. CipherOwl’s APIs are also being built to enable AI agents and external systems to automatically request compliance checks and reports, marking an important step towards autonomous and regulated on-chain financial operations.
Key quotes:
“On-chain is the new rail for value transfer, and volumes are on track to grow 100x by 2030. Legacy platforms are not designed for continuous, permissionless, fast-evolving activities. We need bots/AI agents that monitor flows and act on evidence. CipherOwl turns raw blockchain data into powered decisions “With evidence and explainability that institutions can trust and regulators can audit.”
“Compliance cannot be a check box. It must be scientific: evidence-based, data-driven, and explainable. By grounding AI agents in the reality of blockchain, we give organizations decisions they can trust and defend.”
Liu Liang, Co-Founder and CEO of CipherOwl
“We are at an inflection point where on-chain infrastructure is moving into mainstream financial services. But adoption will only accelerate if compliance infrastructure keeps up with this pace. CipherOwl was built with this in mind, providing interpretable, auditable results that regulators can trust and automate organizations need to scale.”
John Onwuwalu, Director, Flourish Ventures
“The current approach to manual review of transactions simply will not be scalable. CipherOwl has built the intelligence layer that organizations need to operate with confidence in a native AI-driven financial system.”
Mark Bhargava, Managing Director, General Catalyst
