Alterya

Overview

Alterya began in Tel Aviv in 2022 as “Plaid for DeFi,” then abandoned that idea when the crypto bear market removed the market it expected to serve. The founders repurposed their military-cybersecurity experience into an upstream scam-intelligence product for exchanges, payment companies, and banks. By the acquisition announcement, Chainalysis said the product monitored more than $8 billion in monthly transactions and protected 100 million end users.^[1][4]

The pivot worked because crypto offered public transaction data for bootstrapping scam models, while authorized push-payment fraud created a larger problem across payment rails. Chainalysis bought Alterya on January 13, 2025 and kept its 28 employees as an independent product line and Israeli R&D center. Reported prices range from roughly $150 million to $160 million; the parties never disclosed a figure.^[3][15]

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Founding Story

Elad Fouks and Shahaf Gonen founded Alterya in 2022. Fouks became CEO after leading a cybersecurity group in Unit 8200 and serving as a senior officer in Israeli special operations. Gonen, the CTO, graduated from the Talpiot program, led a Unit 8200 cybersecurity team, and worked at Google.^[1] Public accounts do not explain how the pair met; no direct public founding quote from Gonen surfaced in this research.

Their first idea was DeFi infrastructure. In a June 2024 interview with investor Nyca, Fouks said, “Our initial idea was to build Plaid for DeFi by connecting the protocol layer to financial products.” The timing collapsed almost immediately. Alterya raised its seed round into the 2022 crypto bear market and no longer had a healthy customer base on which to test its thesis. Fouks said the team began interviewing large fintech companies and found a different opening: authorized fraud that crossed the visibility gap between traditional payment systems and crypto.^[2]

The founders chose crypto as the laboratory for a broader payment-risk product. Public blockchain histories provided labels and links that closed part of the usual cold-start problem for new fraud models. The team monitored the websites, social channels, chat activity, identities, wallets, and accounts that scammers used before a victim sent money. That upstream vantage complemented transaction anomaly systems, which often see a valid account holder approving a payment and therefore struggle to distinguish deception from intent.

Customer validation became the operating test. Fouks told Nyca, “Signing a POC is definitely at the top of the list. The validation of all our work by having a large company sign a POC with us is when the dopamine hits hardest.” By June 2024, he named Coinbase and Crypto.com among deployments and said the company was moving from crypto providers into real-time-payment networks. He also described the founding process as a “random walk” toward a problem customers would pay to solve.^[2]

Timeline

• 2022: Fouks and Gonen founded Alterya, joined YC Summer 2022, and raised a $9.8 million seed round led by Battery Ventures with NFX, Nyca, and YC participating.^[1][3]
• 2022–2023: The crypto bear market pushed the team away from “Plaid for DeFi” toward APP-fraud detection.^[2]
• June 2024: Alterya had 20 employees, its first U.S. account executive, deployments at Coinbase and Crypto.com, and active expansion into traditional payment networks.^[2]
• January 13, 2025: Chainalysis announced the acquisition. All 28 employees were expected to stay, with Alterya continuing as a product line and R&D center.^[3][4]
• February 26, 2026: OKX adopted Chainalysis Alterya. Chainalysis said monitored volume had passed $23 billion per month and that the product had prevented more than $300 million in losses over the previous year.^[7]