Martin Markiewicz is co-founder and chief executive of Silent Eight, the Singapore company whose AI clears sanctions and screening alerts for some of the world’s largest banks. He is a mathematician and serial entrepreneur who built two companies before he turned to financial crime.
A Mathematician and Two Earlier Companies
Markiewicz studied mathematics at the Warsaw University of Technology. At a technology firm in 2006 he met Julia Markiewicz, later his wife, and Michael Wilkowski, the two people who would found Silent Eight with him. Over two decades he created two companies, one in hydropower and one that linked the physical and digital worlds, before turning to financial crime compliance.
Choosing Singapore
When the three founders went looking for a base, they scored seven cities: San Francisco, New York, London, Dubai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. They rated each on market size, access to funding, and cultural barriers, then trusted the numbers. Singapore won, and he has since said a meritocratic, innovation-minded regulator turned out to be one of the advantages they had not counted on.
Silent Eight built AI that reviews screening alerts the way an analyst would and records its reasoning. HSBC and Standard Chartered became clients, and HSBC Ventures joined the $40 million Series B in March 2022, when revenue had grown sixfold since October 2020.
A Builder Who Likes Bold Bets
Silent Eight now has hubs in New York, London, and Warsaw and is deployed in more than 150 markets, competing with Quantexa, NICE Actimize, and ThetaRay. Outside work he has trained in mixed martial arts, and he has said the founders he admires are the ones who keep going when the odds are against them.
He picked his company’s home with a scoring model, and he built its product on the same instinct. When the data is good enough, he trusts it, and his business is teaching banks to do the same.
