CAT Labs, a crypto-crime-fighting startup led by a former DOJ special agent, raises $4.3 million
Cryptocrime-fighting CAT Labs raised $4.3 million Illustration of Fortune
Lilita Infante spent 10 years as a special agent in the Department of Justice, where she created the first-ever federal task force focused on cryptocurrency and took down illegal networks ranging from dark web marketplaces to crimes against children.
Three months ago, she decided to leave the government and create CAT Labs, a forensics and cybersecurity startup focused on digital asset recovery. After building the company in stealth, CAT Labs announced the launch today with $4.3 million in funding from investors including Castle Island Ventures, Brevan Howard Digital, CMT Digital, RW3 Ventures and Newark Venture Partners.
“Crypto has made it very easy to make money from hacks, scams and scams,” Infante said Fortune in an interview. “There are still many technological gaps in investigative technology in law enforcement that create a huge backlog of cases that fundamentally prevent law enforcement from effectively targeting those cases.”
Courtesy of Lilita Infante
Infante first learned about Bitcoin in 2012 from an episode of The good wife. She had entered the recession with a degree in economics and, after having trouble finding work, understood the appeal of the disruptor technology.
After joining the DOJ in 2012 and starting with money laundering enforcement, she slowly managed to convince her colleagues that Bitcoin would become an important vector and later volunteered to work on the first crypto-related dark web – the cases. During her time leading the crypto task force, she worked on some of the government’s major takedowns of criminal networks, including Hydra, a marketplace that accounted for roughly 80% of all dark web crypto transactions.
Infante realized that cryptocurrency asset mining was an area for growth and decided to create his own company.
“I thought this was an opportunity of a lifetime for me to leave and actually build these tools,” she said.
Launching with eight full-time employees and five contractors, CAT Labs has two verticals. The first is tailored for government customers to help them recover cryptocurrency assets from digital evidence, such as from hacked computers or phones. The second is crypto-focused cybersecurity for the private sector to prevent theft of digital assets and secure their infrastructure architecture.
Current solutions such as the Chainalysis computing software are centered around on-chain solutions, while CAT Labs will combine these tools with tailored off-chain recovery. Infante described them as complementary services, where CAT Labs will integrate different tools into its broader suite. Other members of the founding team include Uri Stav, the former head of security and development at Digital Currency Group, and John Hays, the former DOJ leader in forensic digital asset recovery.
An early client of CAT Labs has been Rand Labs, the Algorand-focused blockchain development firm. CAT Labs was part of the incident response team for the $9.2 million exploit of Algorand wallet provider MyAlgo in late February.
