Renowned technologists and entrepreneurs Neha Narkhede and Sachin Kulkarni announce launch of Oscilar - the first company that uses real-time data and AI to protect every online transaction

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Mar 30, 2023, 09:15 ET

Kulkarni and Narkhede have self-funded Oscilar with a $20M investment – seeing a huge unmet need in a $200B market

SAN FRANCISCO, March 30, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Confluent (NASDAQ: CFLT) Co-Founder and Board Member Neha Narkhede and former Meta engineering executive Sachin Kulkarni today announced the launch of their newest company, Oscilar, with the goal of solving one of the biggest challenges facing businesses and consumers: how to protect online transactions from fraud and theft.

Oscilar is a first-of-its kind real-time Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered platform that, within milliseconds, makes online transactions significantly safer for companies and consumers. Oscilar's all-new approach to fraud and risk management, called AI Risk Decisioning, is the most advanced solution ever created to protect online transactions.

After working in stealth for the past two years, Narkhede and Kulkarni announced that they are self-funding Oscilar with $20 million – opting to not take outside funding so they could quickly build and scale the company.

"We see a huge opportunity to use AI to keep both consumers safe and ensure companies are able to smartly and accurately assess their risk in real time. Customers expect every online transaction to be instantaneous and safe, but existing technology puts businesses and customers at significant risk – and requires intense engineering support and overhead," Oscilar Co-Founder and CEO Neha Narkhede said. "Oscilar changes that. We've spent the past two years putting together a top-flight team of engineers and data scientists – creating a platform that uses AI to fully automate decisions about credit and fraud risk in milliseconds."

The market for risk protection is valued at over $200 billion and is expected to only increase as the number and value of online transactions continues to skyrocket. Credit and fraud risk now costs companies more than $48 billion and consumers $8 billion annually.

"During my time leading engineering teams at Meta, I found that data and AI played a huge role for making risk decisions – but this technology was hard to build and not easily accessible to our business teams. We built Oscilar so that companies could have a thorough risk decisioning solution but wouldn't have to use their engineering teams' valuable time to achieve that," Oscilar Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Sachin Kulkarni said. "Oscilar gives companies the most comprehensive solution to assessing risk in every online transaction – doing this through a no-code AI risk decisioning platform."

The Silicon Valley based company was founded in 2021 and has been operating in stealth mode until now. Oscilar's technology is already being used by industry-leading fintech companies.

Oscilar is built by the same team that created advanced risk management platforms at Apple, Uber, and LinkedIn. Oscilar's founding leadership team includes:

Neha Narkhede is Co-Founder and CEO of Oscilar, and one of America's wealthiest self-made women, according to Forbes. Narkhede is co-creator of Apache Kafka – an open-source distributed streaming system used for stream processing, real-time data pipelines, and data integration at scale – and the co-founder of Confluent. Previously Neha led product and technology at Confluent, and before that, led the data streams charter at LinkedIn where she and her co-founders created Apache Kafka. Born and raised in Pune, India, Narkhede moved to the United States in 2006, where she earned a master's in computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology.
Sachin Kulkarni is Co-Founder and CTO of Oscilar. Prior to Oscilar, Kulkarni worked as an executive at Facebook, where he most recently served as senior director of Engineering and led the team that built Facebook's private cloud, Facebook Live and the backend of Facebook Messenger. He improved trust and safety of the Facebook platform by building hyper-scale real time data processing systems to detect and mitigate fraud and spam. Kulkarni is originally from Pune, India. Kulkarni moved to the United States in 2005, where he earned a master's in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Karthik Ramasamy is the fraud and machine learning (ML) lead at Oscilar where he works on creating ML infrastructure and models to tackle various fraud problems. One of Oscilar's first hires, Karthik led ML and Fraud teams at Google, Uber, and LinkedIn. At Google, he was a Tech Lead in the TensorFlow for Enterprise team and helped launch several enterprise ML products. He was the first Fraud and Risk Data Scientist at LinkedIn, and led Account Security Data Science teams at Uber and LinkedIn. Originally from Tamil Nadu, India, Karthik holds a Master's in Computer Science from Columbia University, specializing in Machine Learning.