Ronan and Conor Burke: ‘Suddenly, every financial institution needed a solution to a problem we had spent years preparing to solve’

Ronan and Conor Burke are twin brothers who cofounded Inscribe in 2017 with the goal of eliminating document fraud from financial services.

Inscribe is an AI-powered document fraud detection platform purpose built for financial institutions. The platform detects forged, fabricated and AI-generated financial documents (including deepfake bank statements, manipulated pay stubs and synthetic tax forms) in seconds, giving risk teams the clarity they need to stop fraud without slowing approvals.

The company is backed by Threshold Ventures, Uncork Capital, Y Combinator, Crosslink Capital and Foundry, and operates offices in San Francisco and Europe, with 40 team members.

Describe your business model and what makes your business unique.

Inscribe is a B2B SaaS platform that helps banks, credit unions and fintechs automatically detect hidden document fraud during onboarding and underwriting. We created the document fraud detection software category in 2017 and our models, which are trained on millions of real-world data points, detect forged, fabricated and now AI-generated documents that legacy tools miss, reducing fraud losses without slowing approvals.

What was your “back-to-the-wall” moment and how did you overcome it?

Fresh out of university with a vision but no product, raising our first external capital was a make-or-break moment. That funding bought us six months, enough time to build a working prototype and prove the concept. It turned out to be the most important six months of the company’s life, as it ultimately led to our acceptance into Y Combinator and set everything in motion.

What moment/deal would you cite as the “game changer” or turning point for the company?

A pivotal moment was onboarding our first fintech business lender customers in 2018, giving us real-world data to build feedback loops on emerging fraud patterns. But the true turning point came when AI-generated document fraud began accelerating rapidly. Suddenly, every financial institution needed a solution to a problem we had spent years preparing to solve. The market came to us.

How will your market look in three years and where would you like your business to be?

Document fraud will be one of financial services’ defining challenges. AI is already making convincing fake documents trivially easy to produce at scale, and that threat will only intensify. We want Inscribe to be the leader in document fraud detection, embedded in the risk workflows of the world’s leading financial institutions.

What are you doing to disrupt, innovate and improve the products or services you offer?

We continuously evolve our platform to stay ahead of an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape. AI-generated document fraud grew by a factor of five in 2025 alone. Our biggest innovation is the shift to agentic AI, moving from a linear, fixed system to one that dynamically adapts to new fraud patterns and risk signals, giving financial institutions a detection capability that evolves as fast as the threat itself.

How much has your company invested in AI and how has it impacted on the performance of the business?

AI has been the foundation of everything we’ve built. Since day one, the majority of our investment has gone into building and refining models trained on millions of real-world data points. That investment translates directly into customer outcomes, helping some of the largest fintechs and banks in the US prevent millions of dollars in fraud losses every year.

What makes your company a good place to work?

Inscribe offers the opportunity to work at the forefront of agentic AI, solving one of financial services’ most pressing challenges. There’s no better environment than a high-growth start-up where AI is evolving daily. We combine that with a highly autonomous culture where people have ownership, and their work has immediate, tangible impact.

What is the single most important piece of advice you would offer to a less experienced entrepreneur?

Back yourself and play the long game. Building something valuable takes far longer than anyone anticipates, and there will be moments where progress feels slow. The entrepreneurs who succeed stay the course when others walk away.