He Tracked Terrorist Money After 9/11. Now His AI Startup Makes $10 Million Fighting Financial Crime

September 9, 2026

He Tracked Terrorist Money After 9/11. Now His AI Startup Makes $10 Million Fighting Financial Crime

Stuart Jones Jr. still feels a sense of shame about the B-minus he earned in a course on scaling new ventures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was 2016, and he was pursuing his MBA after leaving behind a career at the Department of the Treasury (work that had him traveling extensively in Afghanistan and the Middle East) and then in private-sector consulting. Jones and co-founder Gabrielle Haddad were late to turn in an assignment because they were onboarding their very first client for their new venture, AI-powered financial crime compliance platform Sigma360, which officially launched in 2017. About a decade later, the company, which automates customer screening for payment companies and corporate clients, has had runaway success. After some hard lessons and a strategic decision to narrow its core offerings, Sigma360 has grown nearly 10-fold and generated nearly $10 million in revenue in 2025. The company has since onboarded major clients including Rippling, Fitch Ratings, Cushman & Wakefield, and PWC, and raised nearly $35 million in funding to date.

On 9/11, I was at an internship in D.C. I knew I wanted to serve my country, and I wasn't sure how. I got a master's degree in international security studies and interviewed with the Department of the Treasury, which I found out was helping lead the counterterrorism charge by following the money. I thought that was the most interesting angle I had heard to fight weapons proliferation and terrorism.

I was an entrepreneur, even in government. I helped stand up the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, working closely with Tim Geithner, Stuart Levey, and David Cohen. Then I represented the Treasury to stand up a function within the National Counterterrorism Center. I was our financial attache on the ground in Afghanistan for two years and in the Middle East for three years. That experience led to a career in financial crime compliance consulting and advisory services, where I got to meet a lot of the banks and work with them behind the scenes, as I did in government. That experience showed me the power of connecting data to technology to get to better decisions and better context. When I saw the tools that banks were using, I couldn't believe the time and effort involved, and the noise that was coming out of these systems. I thought that there was a better way to do it.

I dropped right into MIT in the middle of the craze around machine learning and AI. I was the MBA student driving all my classmates, including Gabrielle, crazy with this idea to use data and technology to drive better decisions and better context for risk managers. Many months later, we circled back on the idea, and it was Gabrielle who gave me additional confidence to step forward and do this. MIT has an accelerator called Delta V, which is competitive because they give you non-dilutive cash and office space and mentorship for the summer. After that, we got into Barclays TechStars accelerator in New York, and not long after raised our seed round from FinTech collective.

The early days of Sigma360, then called Sigma Ratings, were focused on building a rating concept that was a blend of technology and consulting. We had clients in really interesting countries like Panama, Malta, Latvia, the U.A.E., and Bahrain, but Covid made that travel impossible. We were actually experimenting with shipping everybody 3D goggles to walk us through their day-to-day work, and we could do the rating remotely. Ultimately, we went to the board and said, "We need to focus this business on the tech angle."

At the time, that could mean several different things. We were looking for the absolute white space: Where was there no one else? Where could we be completely different and form a new category? We wasted some time on that. Things really clicked when we realized that screening customers is a big business. It is also a space that's required by law.

When someone wants to work with a fintech or bank, you need to screen that person or that company against media, sanctions, watch lists, enforcement actions, and criminal databases to make sure that they're allowed to participate in the international financial system. And then you need to continuously screen that individual or company, because risk doesn't stand still. If we're doing that on one person or one company, we can handle that pretty easily. But when we get into 1,000 names, or 100,000 names, or even millions of customers, you need to really leverage novel data, core technology, and AI to ensure that you understand the risk of whom you're working with at a point in time, but also perpetually.

We were under the assumption that the legacy providers that had been around for 20 years were really good at screening. But when we discovered that legacy products didn't do a lot of the things that we thought they should do in a modern era, we pointed all of our effort at being 10 times better than everyone in that space. That's when our business really took off.

Finding that true product-market fit-when you have something where the market is pulling you because they want what you have, versus pushing a new idea or a new concept-is a special moment for a company. It started in 2022, which enabled us to raise our Series A, and then it accelerated in 2023. We had triple-digit growth in 2024 and in 2025.

There's a lot of need in our market for modern, sophisticated, AI-driven platform technology for risk management. Over the next five to 10 years, the industry is going to change. My vision is a world where there's integrity in the international financial system, and we have better data, better technology that helps prevent fraud, that helps prevent financial crime, that makes our citizens and our nation safe. And I believe that Sigma360 is going to play a leading role in that future.