The Portuguese startup Cryptologic, founded by Técnico students, has received $50,000 from Outlier Ventures, one of the largest venture capital funds in Web3 and blockchain. The project consists of a platform that will help crypto businesses combat fraud and money laundering.

The company was founded in 2022 by Luís Parra, a 3rd-year Electrical and Computer Engineering student, and Pedro Ribeiro, a 3rd-year Computer Science and Engineering student. Once cryptocurrency provides anonymity, it is often used to commit financial crimes such as money laundering and terrorism financing, even using mainstream platforms. Thus, there was a need to create an entity that could deal with this type of assets, and use tools for risk analysis and forecasting.

Cryptologic developed a plug-and-play solution that uses artificial intelligence to detect high-risk and potentially illegal behaviour, which will help to keep platforms safer.

Luís and Pedro met at JUNITEC, the Junior Enterprises of Instituto Superior Técnico, sharing a passion for blockchain technology and entrepreneurship. “The role of an entrepreneur is extremely inspiring for us. As for doing it during our degree and not waiting to finish, or gaining experience first, I think we both thought ‘why not?’ and that’s when it happened”, explains Luís Parra, Chief Operating Officer at Cryptologic. “The funding will allow us to expand our team, develop a more accurate risk detection algorithm and facilitate the commercial approach,” he adds.

At the moment, Cryptologic has already conducted several project pilots on three different continents, including international cryptocurrency exchanges and decentralised protocols with “extremely positive results”.