Cathy Ross

Cathy Ross is the President and Co-Founder of Fraud.net, a New York City–based, AI-driven fraud-detection and risk-intelligence platform she launched in 2016 with co-founder Whitney Anderson. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Brown University and has more than two decades of experience spanning finance, payments, cybersecurity, e-commerce and digital risk. She is widely cited as one of the first African-American women to own a firm on Wall Street, and reports having founded and sold three companies over her career.

Her professional path runs through both operating and investment roles. She began as a Senior Credit Analyst at Chase Manhattan Bank, then served as Product Development and Marketing Manager at Ocwen Financial Corporation and as Vice President of Investment Banking and Public Offerings at Commonwealth Associates. On the investment side, she was Managing Director, Private Equity at Oasis Capital Partners. From roughly 2006 to 2012 she was Chief Financial Officer, President and a board member of MotherNature.com, an online retailer of vitamins and wellness products that Inc. Magazine ranked among the fastest-growing retail companies.

It was her operating experience at MotherNature.com — struggling to find simple, flexible and affordable fraud-prevention tools — that led her to co-found Fraud.net in 2016. The company now serves merchants, travel agencies and financial-services firms with real-time, data-enriched analytics, and reports operations across 185+ countries with offices in the U.S., U.K., Germany, India, South Africa and Colombia. Fraud.net was invited into Mastercard's Start Path program for innovative fintechs in 2019.

Ross combines a genuine capital-markets/private-equity background with hands-on founder experience, which positions her as an operator-angel: someone who evaluates early-stage (seed) companies through the lens of both an investor and a fraud/fintech domain expert. She is also an active advocate for women and diversity in technology.

• Stage: Seed / early-stage angel investing, consistent with her operator-investor profile.
• Sectors she understands best: fintech, payments, cybersecurity/fraud prevention, e-commerce, and risk & compliance — the domains where she has built and run companies.
• What she values: AI and data-driven approaches to building trust, reducing risk and accelerating growth — the same thesis she articulates for Fraud.net ("enabling organizations to harness AI and data-driven intelligence to build trust, reduce risk, and accelerate growth").
• On the market's direction, in her own words: "AI is going to continue to play a critical role in fraud prevention" — a signal of where she believes durable value in her sector lies.
• Perspective: brings a rare mix of Wall Street private-equity/investment-banking discipline and founder empathy, and a strong personal commitment to backing women and underrepresented founders.