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Every year, up to $500 billion—money meant for roads, healthcare, and defense—vanishes into the pockets of corporate fraudsters in the US. The government only catches a small part of it. The rest is written off as a cost of doing business.
A law school grad, a college dropout, and a former FTC insider teamed up and decided to do something about it.
Together, they’ve raised over $5M to build what you might call “Snitching-as-a-Service”: a venture-backed, AI-powered bounty-hunting firm that gets paid by the government to expose corporate crime. They are actively investigating billions in fraud, just six months into the business.
This is the story of The Antifraud Company.
The founding story
It sounds like the start of a bad joke: a lawyer, a tech bro, and a government agent walk into a venture fund... but instead of a punchline, they walked out with over $5M.
First, you have Sahaj Sharda. Sahaj was a Georgetown undergrad who got so mad about his tuition bill that he spent two years writing a book exposing how elite universities collude to fix prices. In the process, he stumbled upon the billion-dollar idea of monetizing justice through class-action lawsuits like the 568 college cartel antitrust case.
"I realized investigative journalism is the antibody for the American immune system, but it needs a business model to survive."
Sahaj then recruited Alex Shieh. Alex is the 20-year-old Brown dropout who went full Elon Musk on his university's administration. He built a website exposing administrative bloat and emailed 4,000 employees asking what they did all day. He even testified in front of Congress talking about this exact issue. He got disciplined, but Brown later cut 103 jobs.
To complete the trio, they needed someone who knew how the system really worked. Enter David Barclay. David was a former FTC attorney who worked for Lina Khan and got tired of fighting big pharma with one hand tied behind his back. He knew exactly where the skeletons were buried.
Together, they formed the perfect outlier team for an outlier idea: create a venture-scale business exposing corporate fraud.
Three things converged to make this insane idea possible:
LLMs changed the game: You can now process hundred-thousand-page government contracts and dense patent filings at scale. What used to take a team of lawyers months now takes days.
DOGE raised awareness: Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) put waste and fraud on everyone's radar. It also proved that changing the system from the inside is brutally hard. Private sector incentives just work better.
The infrastructure was already there: Whistleblower programs, which pay 10-30% of recovered funds to those who report fraud, have existed for years. They were just waiting for a startup to come along and turn it into a scalable operation.
Check out their launch video👇.
The Snitching-as-a-Service playbook
1/ The business model
The Antifraud Company functions like a biotech firm. Instead of developing drugs, they are developing legal cases against large corporations.
Their process:
Discovery: Use AI and journalists to find potential billion-dollar schemes.
Validation: Rigorously fact-find and try to kill the theory. If it survives, it's real.
Regulatory: Package the case and bring it to the government, kicking off a multi-year legal process
Payout: If the government wins, the company gets 10-30% of the recovery. One big win could fund the entire operation for years.
They only go after cases worth $1B+ because time is their scarcest resource. A small case takes just as long as a big one.
It's a portfolio game. They’re aiming to expose more than ten fraudulent schemes in their first year. Not all will pan out, but the ones that do will be massive.
2/ The role of AI
AI plays a massive role in helping them uncover fraud.
Take the FDA's "Orange Book." It's a list of approved drugs and their patents. Big Pharma companies have an incentive to list bogus patents in the Orange Book to delay cheaper, generic versions of their drugs from hitting the market. Each month of delay can mean millions, sometimes billions, in extra profit.
Historically, finding these bogus patents was like finding a needle in a haystack of legal documents. The Antifraud Company built an AI tool to scan the entire Orange Book, read the patents, and flag the ones that shouldn't be there based on FDA rules.
They are using AI to find the smoke, and then sending in their investigators to find the fire.
3/ The vision
Sahaj sees investigative journalism as the "antibody for the American immune system." They want to double or triple the amount of fraud the government catches each year, effectively creating a private-sector enforcement army that taxpayers don't have to fund.
Here is the bet they are making:
There's so much unenforced corporate fraud in the system that a venture-backed business can be built to find it. With a $500B+ market of un-prosecuted fraud, if they can capture even a tiny fraction, this becomes one of the most impactful companies of the decade.
What this means for you
This is a movement to bring transparency and accountability to the market, and the team is actively looking for talent and tips.
Got a Tip? If you've seen fraud or waste in a past life at a big corporation, they want to hear from you. You can reach them at [email protected].
Want to Join? They're hiring talented investigative journalists, software engineers, and attorneys who want to work on something with real impact.
See you next Tuesday,
Leo
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