Baran Özkan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Flagright, an AI-native AML compliance platform serving over 50 financial institutions across 30+ countries and six continents. He holds the Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS) designation and is recognized as a visionary fintech leader in financial crime prevention.

Originally from Turkey, Baran earned a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University and an M.Sc. in Engineering Management from the University of South Florida, before building product expertise across healthcare, e-commerce, logistics, and fintech. He served as Director of Product at TransferGo, where his firsthand struggle to find a reliable real-time transaction monitoring solution became the founding insight for Flagright.

Frustrated by legacy compliance tools that overpromised and underdelivered, Baran co-founded Flagright to build the modern, no-code AML platform he wished he could have bought. His philosophy centers on treating financial crime as a closed loop of detection, investigation, disposition, and tuning to make compliance both effective and auditable.

Baran co-founded Flagright in 2022 alongside Madhu Nadig, going through Y Combinator (W22), and has since raised $10.2M across three funding rounds, including a $4.3M seed round led by Frontline Ventures. He has previously mentored at Women Go Tech and served as an angel investor in the fintech space.

Under Baran's leadership, Flagright has been named the fastest-growing AML compliance platform in Europe on Sifted's Europe 250 (2025) and recognized by Chartis as a leader in AI for fincrime compliance. The platform delivers 99.99% uptime, sub-700ms processing, a 93% reduction in false positives, and 80% lower compliance costs for clients.