Kalyani Ramadurgam

Kalyani Ramadurgam is the co-founder and CEO of Kobalt Labs, a New York-based company that builds AI-powered compliance automation tools for banks and fintechs.^[3] The company emerged from Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch and has raised $12.7 million in total funding, including an $11 million Series A led by First Harmonic.^[4][13] Kobalt Labs serves more than 20 financial institutions, including Chime, Bilt, Celtic Bank, Emprise Bank, and Meriwest Credit Union.^[3] In December 2025, Ramadurgam was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Finance category.^[1]

Before founding Kobalt Labs, Ramadurgam worked as a financial security engineer at Apple, where she built automated tooling for the Apple Pay fraud team, including systems to block individuals on terrorism watch lists from accessing the platform.^[1][17] She also served as an early engineer and AI product lead at Zenysis Technologies, where she built health data analysis tools deployed by governments in 13 countries.^[10][12] Her experience at both companies — observing the gap between available AI capabilities and the manual processes still used in compliance — became the founding insight for Kobalt Labs.^[2]

Ramadurgam holds a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science with a concentration in artificial intelligence from Stanford University, where she also completed a minor in Human Rights.^[11][12] At age 15, she won a Grand Award in Computer Science at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for research on high-dimensional clustering algorithms applied to face recognition.^[9]

Ramadurgam grew up in San Diego, California, and attended Torrey Pines High School in the Del Mar area.^[9] In 2014, at age 15, she competed at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), where she won a Grand Award in Computer Science for a project titled "High Dimensional Clustering Algorithms Applied to Face Recognition of Obscured Faces."^[9] The Society for Science later identified her as one of 19 ISEF alumni named to the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 list.^[8]

Ramadurgam enrolled at Stanford University, where she earned both a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science with a concentration in artificial intelligence.^[11][12] She also pursued a minor in Human Rights — an unusual pairing with a technical degree that reflected an early interest in the societal implications of technology.^[11] Her AI research at Stanford focused on deploying models in environments with highly sensitive data, including healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing.^[10] She has said that she gravitated toward computer science and mathematics in college but recognized early that she did not want to be a software engineer, describing a need for "a balance of creative, strategic, technical, and interpersonal stimulation."^[11]

Ramadurgam has cited her older brother as a formative influence on her entrepreneurial ambitions. Samvit Ramadurgam, the founder and CEO of Forge Global, is listed among Kobalt Labs' early investors.^[15] She has described watching him build a company as giving her "a front row seat to all the ups and downs of starting a business."^[11]

Apple (pre-2023)

After Stanford, Ramadurgam joined Apple as a financial security engineer on the Apple Pay team.^[1][17] Her mandate included building automated tooling for the fraud team and blocking individuals on terrorism watch lists from accessing the payment platform.^[17][2] Despite working at one of the world's most technologically advanced companies, she found that compliance workflows remained manual. "It meant reading through not just hundreds, but thousands of pages of documentation," she later told Forbes. "Organizations were just throwing bodies at the problem."^[1]

The experience became the direct catalyst for Kobalt Labs. Ramadurgam observed that the compliance tools available to financial institutions were, in her assessment, "not much better than a spreadsheet" — platforms that organized process but did not eliminate the underlying document-reading work.^[3] Her co-founder, Ashi Agrawal, was simultaneously working at Affirm, where she encountered similar manual back-office processes.^[11] The two compared notes and identified a shared problem across fintech compliance.^[11]

Zenysis Technologies (pre-2023)

Before founding Kobalt Labs, Ramadurgam was an early engineer at Zenysis Technologies, a health data analytics company, where she led AI product development.^[10][12] The tools she built at Zenysis were used by governments in 13 countries for health data analysis.^[10] The role gave her experience shipping AI products in high-stakes, government-facing environments — a bridge between her academic research and her later fintech work.^[12]

Ramadurgam has described the Zenysis period as one of professional growth but also restlessness. She valued learning how to run an organization but felt constrained by executing on decisions made by others.^[11] She has said she felt most engaged "when I was connecting with customers, making design decisions, understanding all the moving pieces, and building a product" — a disposition that would define her approach as a founder.^[11]

Kobalt Labs (2023–present)

Ramadurgam co-founded Kobalt Labs in 2023 with Ashi Agrawal, a fellow Stanford alumna who serves as CTO.^[10][5] The two entered Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch as college friends turned co-founders, committing to fintech compliance as the problem space after extensive customer discovery.^[10][11] The company went through at least one major pivot before arriving at its current focus on third-party risk management.^[11] The decision to start with TPRM was strategic: it avoids personally identifiable information, making it easier for risk-averse financial institutions to adopt quickly.^[5]

Kobalt's core product is an AI reasoning engine that ingests internal policies, legal commitments, past compliance assessments, and external legislation to auto-surface and track risks across vendor diligence, partner and merchant risk review, marketing compliance, and internal audit.^[5][6] The platform covers regulatory frameworks including BSA/AML, ACH, UDAAP, privacy, and money movement.^[14] Ramadurgam has described the product's scope as automating "all things third party diligence," from vendor risk assessment through ongoing monitoring to partner and merchant risk review.^[5]

At FinovateSpring 2024, Ramadurgam and Agrawal demoed the product as a two-person company that had raised $1.6 million.^[15] Kobalt Labs won Best of Show at the conference.^[5][15] Early investors included Y Combinator, the a16z Scout Fund, NVIDIA's Inception Program, One Valley Ventures, and Coughdrop Capital, as well as angel investors Eric Migicovsky, the founder of Pebble, and Samvit Ramadurgam, the founder of Forge Global.^[15]

In December 2025, Kobalt Labs announced an $11 million Series A led by Ali Rowghani at First Harmonic, with participation from Alloy Labs and Y Combinator, bringing total funding to approximately $12.7 million.^[13][4] By that point, the company had grown to 12 employees and served more than 20 clients, including Chime, Bilt, Celtic Bank, Emprise Bank, American National Bank, and Meriwest Credit Union.^[3][10] In June 2025, Kobalt Labs became a Gold Member Partner of the American Bankers Association's Partner Network.^[16]

Ramadurgam has described a hands-on approach to product development, meeting biweekly with every client to shape the product roadmap and having spoken with more than 200 compliance officers during customer discovery.^[11][14] She has said the company assembled a council of chief risk officers and chief compliance officers across credit unions, regional banks, community banks, and fintechs to co-create the platform's workflows.^[11]

In December 2025, Ramadurgam and Agrawal were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Finance category for 2026.^[1][2] The Society for Science identified Ramadurgam as one of 19 ISEF alumni on the list.^[8] Kobalt Labs won Best of Show at FinovateSpring 2024 in San Francisco.^[5][15]

Ramadurgam has appeared on the Finovate Podcast, the Breaking Banks podcast, and the Slice of Finance podcast, and has spoken at Fintech Meetup on a panel examining whether banks are modernizing compliance or merely digitizing paper.^[6][7][14]

Ramadurgam is Indian-American and is based in New York City.^[12][18] Her brother, Samvit Ramadurgam, is the founder and CEO of Forge Global, a publicly traded private securities marketplace; he is also an early investor in Kobalt Labs.^[15]