Peter Piatetsky is co-founder and chief executive of Castellum.AI, the New York company that pairs its own sanctions and risk data with AML screening and AI agents. He founded it in 2019 after years of investigating sanctions evasion for the US government.
Sanctions Work at the Treasury
Piatetsky studied international relations at Boston University and earned a master’s in Persian studies at the University of Maryland. At the US Department of the Treasury he worked as an Iran sanctions investigator at the Office of Foreign Assets Control, as an AML and sanctions analyst covering Europe and Eurasia in the Office of Illicit Finance, and as senior policy adviser for Iran and the Levant in the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes.
He also supervised compliance for the US operations of Woori Bank and taught as an adjunct lecturer at American University, so he knew the problem from the regulator’s desk and the bank’s.
Founding Castellum.AI
He co-founded Castellum.AI in September 2019 to fix fragmented financial crime risk data. Instead of licensing lists, the company builds its own sanctions, PEP, adverse media, and high-risk ownership data and screens against it, and it later added AI agents that review alerts and explain each decision. A $4 million seed round came first.
Backed by Its Own Buyers
In July 2025 he announced an oversubscribed $8.5 million Series A led by Curql, a fund backed by more than 130 credit unions including Navy Federal, with funds backed by banks and by RBC joining. He has argued that 99% of AML and KYC alerts are false positives, and he has talked about why compliance agents need a harness of rules and data around the model, not just a model.
Castellum.AI competes with ComplyAdvantage, complead, and Ripjar. For a former investigator, having the institutions he once examined invest in his company is a fitting endorsement.
