Lilita Infante spent 10 years as a special agent with the Department of Justice, creating the first-ever federal task force focused on cryptocurrency and cracking down on illicit networks ranging from dark web markets to crimes against children.
Three months ago, I decided to leave government and set up CAT Labs, a forensics and cybersecurity startup focused on digital asset recovery. After building the company in stealth mode, CAT Labs announced its 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 monetize hacks, scams and scams,” said Infante. luck in an interview. “There are still many technological gaps in law enforcement investigative technology that create a huge backlog of cases that essentially prevent law enforcement from being able to target these cases effectively.”
Courtesy of Lilita Infante
Infante first learned about Bitcoin in 2012 from an episode of Bitcoin the good Wife. I graduated in the slump with a degree in economics and, after having a hard time finding a job, understood the allure of disruptive technology.
After joining the Department of Justice in 2012 and starting to enforce money laundering laws, she was slowly able to convince her colleagues that Bitcoin would become a mainstream carrier, and later volunteered to work on the first crypto-related dark web cases. During the time she led the Cryptocurrency Task Force, she worked on some major takedowns of government criminal networks, incl hydraa market that accounts for about 80% of all dark web crypto transactions.
Infante realized that cryptocurrency asset recovery was an area of growth and decided to start her own company.
“I thought this was the opportunity of a lifetime for me to leave and actually build these tools,” she said.
CAT Labs, which is launching with eight full-time employees and five contractors, has two segments. The first is designed for government clients to help them recover cryptocurrency assets from digital evidence, such as hackers’ computers or phones. The second is cybersecurity that focuses on cryptography for the private sector to prevent theft of digital assets and secure their infrastructure infrastructure.
Existing solutions such as data program sequence analysis are centered around on-chain solutions, while CAT Labs will combine these tools with on-demand off-chain recovery. Described by Infante as complementary services, CAT Labs will integrate different tools into its broader portfolio. Other members of the founding team include Yuri Stav, former chief security and development officer for the cryptocurrency group, and John Hayes, a former Department of Justice official in criminal digital asset recovery.
One of CAT Labs’ first clients was Rand Labs, an Algorand-focused blockchain development company. CAT Labs was part of Incident Response Team $9.2 million From Algorand wallet provider MyAlgo in late February.