Why We Invested in Verdict Machine: AI Security for Institutions Moving On-Chain

Draper Dragon has invested in Verdict Machine's pre-seed round, alongside Y Combinator, Draper Dragon, First Peak Ventures, Gaingels, Latitude Fund, Tekedia Capital, Transpose Platform, Twenty Two Ventures and UNETI AI Labs, alongside angel investors including Alex Bouaziz, CEO of Deel, and John Bax, CEO of OneSource Virtual.

Finance is moving on-chain. Stablecoins settle enormous volumes every year and tokenization is bringing more financial assets onto blockchain rails. Security tooling has not kept pace. Institutions adopting digital assets are handed generic enterprise controls that were never built for on-chain environments, at the same time as AI is making attacks faster and cheaper to run.

Verdict Machine calls what it is building a cyber software factory for on-chain finance. Its AI learns the specifics of each institution's environment, reasons through how an attack would actually unfold there, and generates controls built for that environment.

We invested for three reasons.

First, the team has built this before. The founders launched blockchain security at Check Point, the NASDAQ-listed security company, which means they have shipped in this category from inside a business that already sells to the institutions Verdict Machine is targeting.

Second, distribution is already solved. Verdict Machine has signed a global reseller agreement with Check Point Software Technologies, giving a pre-seed company a route into enterprise security budgets that normally takes years to build.

Third, the product is in use. Customers include LayerZero, crypto's largest cross-chain infrastructure provider, Trilitech, a London-based core contributor to the Tezos ecosystem, and Codexa, a cross-border payments platform running on stablecoins.

Verdict Machine sits where our two areas of focus meet. We have been backing the rails that bring finance on-chain, from tokenized assets to stablecoin payments, and separately the AI infrastructure and agent systems layer. Those rails only carry institutional volume if the security underneath them holds, and security is where AI is most immediately useful.

"As crypto and on-chain finance gain institutional adoption, they need cybersecurity that meets institutional standards," said Samiz Bayan, Partner at Draper Dragon. "Bringing meaningful capital on-chain requires confidence in the systems protecting it. That confidence starts with security built around each institution's architecture."

"We're pioneering AI that works like a specialized cybersecurity research team: it understands each institution's cyber context, critically analyzes risks, reasons through potential attacks and builds custom controls to protect its assets and operations," said Dan Danay, co-founder and CEO of Verdict Machine.

Learn more about Verdict Machine here.