Canonical builds decision infrastructure for modern financial platforms.
Fintech teams rely on powerful systems like Stripe, but critical risk context is often missing or underused. As a result, rules become brittle, fraud signals decay, and teams are forced to choose between growth and control.
Canonical exists to close that gap. We help teams capture real world signals and translate them into clear, explainable risk decisions. Our platform enriches existing risk engines with high quality context and uses AI to turn that context into rules teams can trust and evolve.
This approach reduces false positives, shortens iteration cycles, and keeps risk systems aligned with how businesses actually operate as they scale.
Canonical is built by experts who have designed and run fraud and decision systems at scale, and is backed by leading Tier 1 investors who believe the next generation of financial infrastructure will be decision native.
Investors
ABOUT US
Meet our Founders
Misha and Tahin met at Stripe, where they worked on high-scale risk and fraud systems — blending machine learning with distributed systems to protect billions in payments. Across roles at Stripe, Mercury, and Interac, they've spent over a decade building risk systems that turns real-world signals into actionable insight.
With deep experience across AI, engineering, and data science, they started Canonical Labs to solve a hard but common problem: how to catch fraud faster, scale ops without adding headcount, and bring clarity to messy signals. Their work helps financial institutions reduce losses, improve decision systems, and build automation.
Canonical partners with high-growth teams to tackle the problems that traditional vendors ignore — from reducing alert fatigue to unblocking approvals, accelerating market expansion, and bringing AI into production risk workflows.
JOIN OUR TEAM
Help us build the defense against fraud.
Canonical's mission is to make fraud detection practical for every company processing payments on the internet. Join our mission to build the next generation of fraud detection tools for Agentic Commerce.
How we think and work
We build like engineers, think like risk teams, and move like founders. Here's how we work.
Users first
Users first. Canonical second. Team third.
We are ex-Stripes. This is drilled into us.
Ship like it matters
Shipping is the feedback loop that makes us build, deploy, and iterate faster.
Build for the problem, not the solution
We don't guess. We sit with users, read their logs, and watch what breaks.
Every insight starts with proximity to pain.
Precision over polish
We care about clarity and correctness before gloss.
Smart beats shiny. Usable beats ornamental.
Use AI like a power tool, not a crutch
AI accelerates our judgment. It doesn't replace it.
Understand first, build second, automate third.
Small team, big surface area
We do more with less because we trust each other to own things fully.
No handoffs, no tickets for things that can be a Slack DM.
Say the quiet part out loud
Honesty > Harmony.
Assume good intentions, but say the quiet part out loud.
Don't tax momentum with process
If we're debating templates instead of shipping code, something's broken.
We rather be stressed than bored
Challenge is a feature, not a bug.
Humble in judgment, ruthless in standards.
We care more about getting it right than being right.
Open roles
Don't see a perfect fit? We love thoughtful cold emails. Tell us about your superpower at careers@gocanonical.com.