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Go-to-market executive with in-depth global experience at startups and large public…
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Ajit Deshpande shared thisMeet our Blockaid team at SALT in case you are attending. DM me if you wish to connect!Ajit Deshpande shared thisBlockaid is attending SALT's Wyoming Blockchain Symposium: As policymakers and institutions come together to shape the future of digital assets, onchain security belongs at the center of that conversation. We look forward to meeting with everyone there.
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Ajit Deshpande shared thisLast year, I had the privilege of being part of Sapiom‘s very first investment round, a pre-seed convertible round. I was introduced to Ilan Zerbib by my good friend Baris Aksoy, and I had a free-flowing conversation with Ilan about his prior role leading payments at Shopify and about his vision for Sapiom. At the time, the startup was three weeks old and Ilan’s pitch was narrated in a document. Ilan was very clear that agentic payments were going to disrupt existing online constructs, and that there was going to be a huge need for guardrails for spend approvals as well as for microtransaction execution. Sapiom was his solution for this disruption. Today’s Series A is validation for the scale and scope of this opportunity. Congrats to the team!Ajit Deshpande shared thisEleven months ago, I founded Sapiom. Six months ago, we announced our $15 million seed. Today, we are announcing our $35 million Series A, led by Dragonfly, with participation from Accel, Anthropic, Gradient, Coinbase, Operator Collective 🔆, Formus Capital, and VanEck, alongside continued support from existing investors including Okta Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Array Ventures, bringing total funding to $50 million. Alongside the round, we’re revealing what we’ve spent those eleven months building: Sapiom Router, Sapiom Agent Studio, and Sapiom Agent Runtime Every tool humans have ever built was designed for a human operator. For the first time, software can be the operator. Agents are deciding which tool to use, which service to call, and which action to take next on their own. Almost none of our software or financial infrastructure was built for that. Today, anyone can build a capable agent demo in a weekend. Getting it to run reliably at scale, at a cost the business can sustain, is much harder. Before moving to Sapiom, one customer running thousands of agents asked what should have been a reasonable question: How many agents ran yesterday, and what did they cost? The answer was $12,000, but nobody knew what it had paid for. They could not see which agents ran, which tasks succeeded, where agents got stuck, or how many times they retried the same failed step. Sapiom is production infrastructure for AI agents. It sits at the exact moment an agent is about to act. For every action, Sapiom selects the best allowed path across models, compute, tools, and services based on cost, performance, permissions, and the boundaries the business has set. Because we run our own inference stack on dedicated GPUs, you get the most affordable path while also keeping your data in the US. Budgets and permissions are enforced before anything runs, and every step is recorded with its cost and outcome. - Sapiom Router lowers what you pay per call by matching every call to the right model instead of defaulting to the most expensive one. It takes two lines of code to try against agents you're already running. - Sapiom Agent Studio is where builders create, test, inspect, and deploy agents as real code inside the coding environment they already use. - Sapiom Agent Runtime is the production infrastructure where those agents run, recover from failures, access outside capabilities, and operate within the boundaries you set. In our first six months, Sapiom has processed more than 270 million transactions across more than 100,000 daily agent runs. One customer reduced its inference costs by 75%. We're starting with cost because that's where the economics break first. Our ambition is to remove everything standing between builders and the next trillion agents. Bring the agents you already have, or start fresh. Your first agent can be running on Sapiom in under 10 minutes.
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Ajit Deshpande shared thisLast week, our team at Blockaid shared our H1 2026 Onchain Security Incident Report - a 20 page document that dives into the make-up of 212 high threshold security incidents that we detected during the first half of this year. H1 2026 was the most hacked half year in crypto. Just in this one half we had more than 3x the number of incidents that we saw in ALL of 2025. And more than a billion dollars were drained across these incidents. More importantly, the scope and dimensionality of these incidents has been eye-opening: state actors such as DPRK pulled off multi-month social engineering exploits that drained 100s of millions of dollars, new exploit vectors emerged which might become more prevalent in the future, we even saw an AI agent get hacked. Blockchain technology, and broadly decentralized governance and actions have immense utility in global value exchange; yet this value exchange must be done securely in order for adoption to scale. And the first step towards bringing security is to have a clear view of threat vectors and the drivers behind them. That’s what our report dives into. Get the full 20-page report here: blockaid.io/h1-report-2026
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Ajit Deshpande shared this1. AI is making hackers more sophisticated. Onchain security incidents are rising exponentially 2. Regulatory policy around crypto is getting clearer, with the Clarity Act making progress in legislation. Regulatory clarity --> Hopefully more crypto adoption More security incidents --> Less trust in crypto --> Muted crypto adoption What gives? Join us for a webinar next week, when three industry veterans discuss this! Sign up here: https://luma.com/af6hkhawAjit Deshpande shared thisThe Rules Are Finally Coming. So Why Are the Exploits Getting Worse? Blockaid is hosting a live webinar: Roni Sidi (Blockaid), Jessi Brooks (Ribbit Capital), and Rebecca Rettig (Jito Labs) on what happens when legal accountability and security failures collide, and what it means for onchain builders, investors, and infrastructure. Register here: https://luma.com/af6hkhaw
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Ajit Deshpande shared thisThis month Blockaid turned 4! Congrats to the team for continuing to shape our culture and impact over these years. Lots more to come. Come join us in this journey.Ajit Deshpande shared this🎂 Blockaid turns 4. We started as a small group working on a big idea. Today, we're the security layer for the largest companies operating onchain. Come join us: http://blockaid.io/careers
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Ajit Deshpande shared thisBlockaid is the best onchain exploit detection platform out there, bar none. Working with our ecosystem to respond to and contain incidents - thats what we do every single day and week. And we take pride in this role. https://lnkd.in/gyC5PFRH
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Ajit Deshpande shared thisHello network! I am hiring a Director of Product Marketing, to head up this function within Blockaid. If you know of any rockstar PMM leaders who operate at or around the confluence of crypto, security, and SaaS, please DM me. Happy to engage with your referrals! Link to the job description is here: https://lnkd.in/gU6u9hUb #blockaid #productmarketing #biastowardsaction #onchainsecurity
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Ajit Deshpande shared thisThanks John A. for bringing attention about this and other security incidents recently. Our team at Blockaid has seen a 10x increase in high value security exploits since mid last year. These incidents can literally be classified into two major buckets: first bucket being weak or ‘lazy’ governance mechanisms or processes, such as not having sufficient approval redundancies, not having time locks, not having sufficient checks on price deviations etc, and the second bucket being actual contract vulnerabilities or code bugs or users falling victim to social engineering scams. A secure posture needs both, strong governance and policies, and cutting edge real-time cyber and fraud prevention. As someone who only a few months ago transitioned from Circle to Blockaid , I have come to realize that while crypto has begun to cross one chasm, that of getting regulatory clarity, the second chasm, that of deserving customer trust, is still to be crossed. Crossing that second chasm is going to need real time monitoring, rapid detection of security exploits, and always on risk exposure tracking.Ajit Deshpande shared thisToday, StablR — a regulated, MiCA-compliant, reserve-backed stablecoin issuer — lost $2.8M and watched its tokens depeg to $0.70 on the dollar. Not because of a bug in its code. Because someone got hold of a private key. The attacker didn't need to defeat StablR's reserves, its regulatory standing, or its smart contracts. They just needed the key to the printing press. Once they had it, they minted $12M in new tokens and sold into the market until liquidity ran out. This is the critical distinction the industry keeps glossing over. You can build a perfectly sound financial product and still lose everything at the key management layer. Reserves don't protect you. Regulation doesn't protect you. The security of the private key is the security of the system — full stop. This is the second stablecoin minting exploit this year using near-identical mechanics. The attack is becoming a playbook.
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Ajit Deshpande shared thisLast week, our team at Blockaid launched our latest product: Risk Exposure for Compliance. Why Blockaid Risk Exposure? 1. Low compliance levels imply higher risk - This has been true for ever. Non-compliant entities and illicit funds imply higher risk to any ecosystem, whether web2, or web3/onchain, or hybrid. 2. Compliance checks so far have been slow and laggy - Compliance tools today are still 'point in time'. They check boxes in a checklist at some time stamp. If the compliance level of a digital asset or address worsens over time, no one will know until the next compliance check. 3. The onchain world is fast, in both good ways and bad - In the onchain / web3 / crypto world, assets can move and be custodied seamlessly and rapidly, with almost no need for human intervention. Unfortunately, that also means that hackers and scammers can rapidly exploit vulnerabilities and drain value immediately too. If hackers can drain funds in an instant, wouldn't we want to track compliance levels in real-time, and always? Wouldn't we want to know *in real-time and continuously* if the onchain funds we are dealing with are not illicit or stolen? Enter Blockaid Risk Exposure Blockaid Risk Exposure, leveraging our robust platform, our cutting-edge security engine, and our far-reaching customer data network, in real-time tracks the toxicity or risk levels of funds flowing into an onchain ecosystem, funds that are custodied within the ecosystem, and funds flowing out from an ecosystem. And through a choice of a stand-alone API or through intergrations into our Onchain Monitoring product and our Cosigner product, we enable our customers to get alerted or to block such risky assets or transactions. This is Real-time onchain compliance. This is Blockaid Risk Exposure. Read more at https://lnkd.in/gdVFVxTb #blockaid #onchainsecurity #realtimecomplianceCompliance Can't Wait a Minute: Introducing Blockaid Risk Exposure | Blockaid BlogCompliance Can't Wait a Minute: Introducing Blockaid Risk Exposure | Blockaid Blog
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Ajit Deshpande liked thisAjit Deshpande liked thisCircle 🤝 Chelsea Football Club USDC is coming to global football. Circle is proud to partner with Chelsea FC, one of the most recognized football clubs in the world. Beginning with the 2026/27 season, Circle and USDC will appear on the front of Chelsea’s Men’s, Women’s, and Academy shirts. Football connects people across borders, languages, and markets. USDC was built for that same global economy: trusted digital dollars that move with internet speed, 24/7 availability, and global reach. The global game. The global digital dollar. https://lnkd.in/gMCtCeGG
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Ajit Deshpande liked thisBig day for Circle and Chelsea Football Club. A partnership forged from shared values and a deep human commitment to the global community of millions of Chelsea and global football fans. We worked hard on this. Harder than most will understand. It's a great story that will play out on the field and with USDC. Let's go!Ajit Deshpande liked thisCircle 🤝 Chelsea Football Club USDC is coming to global football. Circle is proud to partner with Chelsea FC, one of the most recognized football clubs in the world. Beginning with the 2026/27 season, Circle and USDC will appear on the front of Chelsea’s Men’s, Women’s, and Academy shirts. Football connects people across borders, languages, and markets. USDC was built for that same global economy: trusted digital dollars that move with internet speed, 24/7 availability, and global reach. The global game. The global digital dollar. https://lnkd.in/gMCtCeGG
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Ajit Deshpande liked thisAjit Deshpande liked thisSocure raised at a $5.2 billion valuation this morning. The number that actually explains it is 8,000%. That's the growth in AI-driven fraud attacks over the past year. US organizations already spend $100 billion a year on fraud and compliance operations. Most of it still done by hand, and as fraud continues to scale this isn't manageable. Fraud attacks scale like software. Teams scale like hiring plans. That gap is the whole thesis. So this morning we also acquired Fravity AI. An agentic operations platform for fraud, risk, and compliance, built by operators who ran fraud systems at Google and PayPal. It ships natively inside RiskOS as RiskOS_Agents. In existing deployments: Cost per case down 80%. Resolution up to 5x faster. False positives down as much as 70%. A valuation is what the market thinks you're worth today. An acquisition is what you intend to do about tomorrow. We announced both in one sentence on purpose. Welcome Kedar Samant, Rushik Upadhyay, and the Fravity AI team. Thank you Andrew Collins, Matthew Hamilton, and Summit Partners along with the team at Goldman Sachs, Docusign, and Wells Fargo.
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Ajit Deshpande liked thisAjit Deshpande liked thisI spent an entire day talking about LinkedIn and I still could've kept going... My brain had more LinkedIn to give. My 26-week-pregnant feet did not. 😂 A huge THANK YOU to everyone who joined me for my: LinkedIn: Building Trust, Authority & Influence workshop. I've been thinking a lot about the conversations we had in the room. We covered A LOT... (you know this is what you get with me!) But a few ideas seemed to create the biggest "aha" moments: 1️⃣ Posting consistently isn't the goal - being known for something is ↳ Before worrying about what to post, you have to answer a much bigger question: What do you actually want people to associate your name with? Your profile, content, engagement and network should all reinforce that answer. 2️⃣ Your LinkedIn strategy... is bigger than your content strategy ↳ In 2026, ALIGNMENT is KEY. What does your profile communicate? Who are you intentionally connecting with? Whose conversations are you showing up in? What expertise are you consistently reinforcing? 3️⃣ Engagement is a strategy - Not an afterthought ↳ The best way to increase visibility is through engagement The goal isn't to comment more. It's to be intentional about where you show up, who you engage with and what you add to the conversation. 4️⃣ LinkedIn is working differently - That means you need to use it differently ↳ The platform has changed. Your feed has changed. The way content gets seen has changed. And the answer isn't to post more ... I promise! 🌟 The Biggest Takeaway: ↳ Become much more intentional about what you want to be known for and how every part of your LinkedIn presence supports it. This is how you see success. NOT posting more. NOT spamming people. NOT sending cold DMs. NOT chasing the algorithm. NOT using AI to replace the work. Put in the work - you will see the results! Thank you again to everyone who attended! I hope you walked away with more clarity and actionable steps to build your strategy in a new, refreshed way! 👉 If you attended, is there anything you'd add to my list? 👉 Any "aha" moments or things you learned you didn't know before? And a big shout-out to Marketers' Community and TRICIA GOEDE thank you for capturing some action shots!
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Ajit Deshpande reacted on thisAjit Deshpande reacted on thisSome personal news: after nearly three of the best and most intense years of my career, I’m leaving Blockaid. In my first days after signing, we had no office, little revenue, and worked with Ido Ben-Natan and Raz Niv in a hotel basement. Our team in Israel was living through war, reserve duty, rockets, and pure insanity after Oct 7th. They hustled, never complaining once. It was the most inspiring thing I've ever seen. We built the commercial organization from zero to nearly 40 people around the world: an incredible global team that ran 24/7. There were all nighters in customer war rooms. Crazy end of quarter sprints. And goals we thought impossible that we ended up crushing. We became the fastest growing company in crypto security. We won some of the biggest and most important companies in the world as customers. We stopped the biggest exploits, shut down huge cybercriminal organizations, and saved people hundreds of millions of dollars. And as AI started giving attackers even more superpowers, Blockaid became kryptonite. We were the first to find attacks and the first to stop them, days before competitors. Customers jumped to work with our product and team. But it was not easy. Blockaid is hardcore in the best possible way. There are no words to describe the intensity of working at a Cyberstarts company. It is also one of the best experiences in the world. It forms you into the best version of yourself, and you can handle anything afterwards. Blockaid is one of the strongest and most resilient teams I have ever worked with and I am incredibly proud of what we built together. Can confidently say we are solving the most important problem in crypto, and paving the way for both financial freedom and AI to transact onchain. Thank you to the entire Blockaid team and the board who trusted me to help build this company. I’m incredibly excited about where I’m headed next, and will share soon. Ido Ben-Natan Raz Niv Tim Windhorst Nick Kelleher Jimmy Simons Charles Day Jono Cowling Benjamin Lewis Bailey Marshall Sam Windfield John Moutopoulos Aaron Holt Jono Cowling Dafna Sborovsky Yarden Korkidi Roni Sidi Ajit Deshpande Hed Bar-Nissan Assaf Schwartz Tom G Kevin Venturino Rohit Malhotra Ran Barth Meg (Megal) Yodfat Guy Ezer Carlos Salguero David Kandel Elad Ernst Jordan E. Kaushal Patel (KP) Moshe Golan Neru Arul Seth Steiman Alana Levin Zack Rosen Lior Simon
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Ajit Deshpande liked thisIn recent months, I have been in several situations where I needed to evaluate how and where AI should fit into an existing process. The same question has also come up in peer conversations, meetups, and panel discussions I have been part of. I have shared my current thoughts in this article. Would love your feedback! #GenerativeAI #AIWorkflows #AIAgents #EnterpriseAI #AutomationMost "AI Agents" Are Workflows - And That's Often a Good ThingMost "AI Agents" Are Workflows - And That's Often a Good Thing
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Ajit Deshpande liked thisIf you have shipped an LLM-powered feature into production, you have probably faced this question: Do we absorb the AI cost within our SaaS offering or give customers choices and charge for the models, features, and usage they select? Either way, token cost quickly becomes a product and engineering concern, not merely an API bill. I wrote about some practical ways to be more token-frugal. Give it a read, and I would love to hear how your team approaches token cost, model routing, and context management in production. #AI #GenerativeAI #LLM #Tokenomics #RAG #AIEngineering #EnterpriseAI #SaaS #ProductEngineering
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Fabio Iunis de Paula
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Fabio, is a tech investor and trailblazer in the Venture Capital cross-border US-Latin America. Deeply passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and innovation, he is a co-founder and General Partner at IndicatorCapital, based in the heart of Silicon Valley since 2018. He has a rich experience spanning over two decades in Venture Capital and management across various sectors.<br><br>His previous roles include a 13-year tenure as an Investment Director at INTEL CAPITAL and a founding partner of SOUTH-NET, a B2B incubator during the Internet surge in 2000. Fabio’s diverse experience also extends to multiple executive and operational roles at tech giants such as Intel, LUCENT Technologies (Bell Labs), and IBM. He has made significant contributions to the adoption of emerging technologies and the VC ecosystem in Latin America with roles in investments, CVC, Corporate Dev, Sales and Marketing, Engineering, and R&D. He managed and help hiring and deployment over 300 POCs and Pilots of new technologies use cases to the top 100 corporations in Latin America, generating revenues in aggregate of billion dollar figures in technology solutions <br><br>Fabio currently sits on the board of CTASmart / Link2Pump, Beegol, Rumina, Neowrk, UmGraueMeio, and Fu2Re. He also has an extensive list of successful dealmaking, development, and exits in his VC action, with an unique B2B track record.
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Mar Hershenson
From our PearX S25 cohort, meet Pravāh, the AI-native operating system for the electric grid When Mohak Mangal, Dhruv Suri, and Aman Gupta looked at the strain on the U.S. electric grid, they saw a system pushed to its limits. Exploding demand and unpredictable supply have made blackouts increasingly common. This costs the economy more than $150B a year, a number that could 10x in the next five years. Mohak Mangal and team founded Pravāh to help fix it. Their platform helps utilities and grid operators make real-time decisions on load, generation, and congestion, reducing blackout risks, optimizing power procurement, and bringing much-needed stability to the backbone of modern life. We’re proud to support the Pravāh team as they take on one of the toughest and most important infrastructure challenges of our time.
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Roseanne Wincek
Great point in a recent Newcomer Substack from Sriram Mani that’s worth highlighting, not breezing past: Dual valuation deals are very hard on new employees. Anyone hired after a round has their 409a impacted by that round. A second, sometimes smaller but higher priced round creates a price floor for your employees, making your hiring currency less valuable. Private company stock is the biggest source of wealth creation for tech employees, and employees are savvier than ever about how it works. One of the biggest benefits of taking money from top tier investors is the access to talent that it opens up. Great people want to work for companies that are backed by great investors. You get the signal from the round, but burn the upside for your employees (and risk losing great talent to companies with more valuable options). You’re better off spacing out your rounds and launching a hiring cycle in between, so you can get the best talent and reward them well. In the long run, you’ll maximize your valuation far more by being a talent magnet who makes employees rich than by simply optimizing for a moment in time.
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