CipherOwl, a San Francisco-based defense and compliance technology company founded by former Coinbase executives, has exited stealth with $15 million in seed funding. The funding round was co-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 the AI-native intelligence layer that enables financial institutions to automate and audit blockchain compliance at scale. CipherOwl’s platform transforms raw blockchain data into explainable, evidence-backed decisions for regulatory reporting and internal oversight—solving one of the biggest bottlenecks in institutional crypto adoption: compliance scalability.
CipherOwl’s technology is designed to address the growing complexity of blockchain compliance as on-chain transactions surge globally. Its platform uses an AI-driven “SR3 stack” (Screening, Reasoning, Reporting, and Research) that automates the compliance process end-to-end—from transaction screening and risk detection to audit-ready reporting.
The system’s AI orchestration layer ensures that all actions and findings are explainable, reproducible, and regulator-ready, helping institutions keep pace with the explosion in cross-chain transaction activity.
The company’s founders, CEO Leo Liang and CPO Ming Jiang, previously led Coinbase’s on-chain data and compliance infrastructure. 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 reporting.
CipherOwl’s launch comes at a pivotal moment for the digital asset industry. With governments and regulators worldwide demanding the same anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism standards applied in traditional finance, compliance automation has become mission-critical. The company’s technology positions it to play a central role as financial institutions and payment providers move toward AI-native, blockchain-integrated operations.
How the funding will be used: The funding will be used to accelerate hiring across engineering and compliance, expand support for additional blockchain networks, and strengthen institutional partnerships. CipherOwl’s APIs are also being built to enable AI agents and external systems to automatically request compliance checks and reports, marking a significant step toward autonomous, regulated financial operations on-chain.
KEY QUOTES:
“On-chain is the new rail for moving value, and volumes are on track to grow 100x by 2030. Legacy platforms weren’t built for always-on, permissionless, and fast-evolving activities. We need robots/AI agents that monitor flows and act with proof. CipherOwl turns raw blockchain data into evidence-backed, explainable decisions that institutions can trust and regulators can audit.”
“Compliance can’t be a checkbox. It must be scientific: evidence-based, data-driven, and explainable. By grounding AI agents in blockchain truth, we give institutions decisions they can trust and defend.”
Leo Liang, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, CipherOwl
“We’re at an inflection point where on-chain infrastructure is moving into mainstream financial services. But adoption will only accelerate if compliance infrastructure keeps pace. CipherOwl was built with this in mind, delivering explainable and auditable outcomes regulators can trust and the automation institutions need to scale.”
John Onwualu, Principal, Flourish Ventures
“The current approach of manual transaction review simply won’t scale. CipherOwl has built the intelligence layer that institutions need to confidently operate in an AI-native financial system.”
Marc Bhargava, Managing Director, General Catalyst
