Karine Mellata is the co-founder and CEO of Variance. She discusses how AI coding agents multiply the engineering output of their lean team.
Insight
Mellata: AI Agents Eliminate the Need for Specialized Fraud Classifiers
“You don't need a classifier anymore because AI agents are able to read a set of standard operating procedure and reason over an image or reason over sort of unstructured data and know that this is possibly chargeback fraud. You don't need a specialized classif…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mellata: Variance's non-technical CSM ships features autonomously with Cursor
“Our customer success manager, who's entirely non-technical, but interfaces with enterprise customers on a day-to-day basis, now gets to take on feature requests, especially the simple ones, directly give them to Cursor, a Cursor agent, and then directly be abl…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mellata: Variance detected state-sponsored election fraud for a Fortune 500 client
“And throughout the elections, because our AI agents had access to the context of entities in relation to other entities, so How does this user fit into all of the other users that we're looking at? We were able to detect really complex fraud rings of especiall…”
Assertion Supported
Mellata: Variance Reviews GoFundMe Fundraisers and Fortune 50 Seller Verifications
“We've been working with GoFundMe, for instance, to review all of their fundraisers at scale, some Fortune 50 for verifying all of their sellers and complex UBO verifications, and today coming out of stealth.”
Assertion Supported
Mellata: GoFundMe uses Variance AI agents for fraud and sanctions compliance
“So Variance is used to verify, for instance, if a fundraiser is going to be built for A military operation, for instance, or if you're building a fundraiser for a crisis that you were not part of, which would be fraudulent, well, GoFundMe sort of has the respo…”
Insight
Mellata: Automating KYC and KYB Requires Only Three Core Building Blocks
“There's really only three building blocks that you need. So you have the compliance documents, the standard operating procedure, so what the company deems As necessary to verify at the onboarding level or at any other parts of the life cycle of that entity. On…”