Darwinium, a leader in cyberfraud prevention, today announces the acceleration of its go-to-market strategy. Michael Rodriguez has been appointed as Global Head of GTM, and Darwinium has added two new U.S.-based roles to support rapid customer growth and deployment. Donnie Gates has been named Senior Director, Fraud and Trust Advisory, and Melissa Griffin joins the team as Senior Solutions Engineer.
The hires underscore Darwinium’s growing momentum in the North American market, and its focus on helping fintechs, banks and eCommerce merchants strengthen trust in an era where agentic AI transforms how customers and automated agents interact with online services.
“Businesses are dealing with a whole new fraud economy. AI-powered assistants and automation have become embedded in everyday digital experiences, and fraud and abuse are evolving beyond the traditional ‘human vs. bot’ model,” said Alisdair Faulkner, CEO and Co-founder of Darwinium. “Instead, it’s about whether an interaction, be it human or agentic, is trusted or risky across the digital journey. Darwinium helps enterprises answer that with journey-wide visibility and real-time decisioning, and we’re building a go-to-market team with the commercial and operational experience to translate that model into measurable impact for customers, before AI-powered attackers outpace traditional security strategies.”
Michael Rodriguez brings more than two decades of go-to-market leadership across payments, fintech, and digital identity to his new role. A serial entrepreneur, he has built and scaled early-stage companies to successful exits, including serving as COO of InAuth through its acquisition by American Express. He has also held executive and leadership roles at GE, Visa, Microblink, and Bureau.id, helping launch and scale identity and fraud platforms across global markets.
Donnie Gates joins Darwinium as Senior Director, Fraud and Trust Advisory, bringing extensive experience working with enterprises to reduce fraud while protecting customer experience. He has held strategic and growth roles at fraud and trust leaders, including Riskified, BioCatch, Forter, and 41st Parameter.
Through her work at LexisNexis, ThreatMetrix, Prove, and NeuroID, Melissa Griffin joins Darwinium with deep expertise in optimizing identity and fraud solutions within user onboarding, authentication, and transaction flows. As a Solutions Consultant, she will partner with customers to operationalize Darwinium’s fraud and trust defenses to drive growth and risk reduction across critical user journeys.
Darwinium’s GTM and business expansion follow increasing demand from large digital platforms looking to protect customer journeys from AI-driven fraud automation. This fraud has become more pervasive and harder to distinguish from legitimate activity. In a published case study, Udemy, one of the world’s largest online learning marketplaces with millions of global users, describes how Darwinium’s journey-level visibility helps connect risky behaviors across sign-ups, logins, checkouts, and more, without requiring additional fraud analysts or heavy engineering builds. Udemy notes that this approach can accelerate investigations and response, empowering them to identify threats and explore a path to a solution in a matter of minutes. By growing its executive and sales team, Darwinium aims to create more success stories for companies, empowering them against fraudsters with a platform that addresses agentic threats as they evolve, instead of retrofitting yesterday’s controls.
“I’ve worked with many high-growth startups, but what drew me to Darwinium is the clarity of their approach, combined with the strength of the founders and team, and their deep market expertise,” said Michael Rodriguez. “They’ve built an AI-native trust layer that understands user intent across the journey and can be operationalized quickly. That combination positions Darwinium for meaningful global adoption, and I’m excited to help scale it in North America and beyond.”
To learn more about Darwinium and its approach to fraud and trust in the era of agentic AI, visit: https://www.darwinium.com/