Melissa Yearta appointed Director of Marketing to help scale the brand from product build into sales and marketing phase
Ferret, an AI platform empowering companies and individuals with real-time, risk-assessment intelligence, announced today that it has appointed fraud-prevention industry veteran Greg Loos as Chief Operating Officer.
Currently in open beta, Ferret will launch its mobile-friendly app later this year.
Loos is a co-founder and served as President and Board Member of Pondera Solutions, a fraud analytics SaaS company acquired for a reported $125M by Thomson Reuters in 2020. Pondera is known for providing fraud detection analytics to government agencies, notably California’s Employment Development Department. Prior to Pondera, Loos spent 23 years at Oracle Corp. in senior management positions. While there, he led large teams of sales and marketing professionals servicing the state and local government market, responsible for more than $100M annually in software and services.
“From my perspective combating fraud in large U.S. government programs over the past decade, I believe Ferret has the capacity to serve a global market and prevent scammers of all kinds,” says Loos. “Using AI, machine learning, public information and natural language processing, Ferret will provide instant reputation insights as well as relational intelligence monitoring on business partners and associates. This intelligence will be pushed to subscribers on a mobile device in real-time. With Ferret, transparency will be the new norm.”
Also joining Ferret as Director of Marketing is Melissa Yearta, an executive with 15 years of experience in global technology, SaaS and CPG companies, including Teladoc, LogMein, Citrix and Mediasmith. Most recently, she was a marketing executive with payment software producer Fullsteam.
Ferret was co-founded by serial entrepreneur Rob Loughan and technologist Al MacDonald. Loughan is a pioneer in mobile apps and SaaS, and the co-founder of one of Silicon Valley’s earliest unicorns, Octane Software, which sold for a record $3.2B in 2001.
“Greg’s in-depth executive experience in the fraud-detection industry will be invaluable as we scale up,” says Loughan. “Early on as an angel investor, I was defrauded for $1.5 million. I vowed then to pursue a way to help others avoid the same plight. Now that machine-learning technology has caught up with my ambition, I welcome Greg and Melissa to the Ferret team as we pursue our dream of making risk-assessment data affordable and accessible to everyone – not just government agencies and financial institutions.”
Delivered via an easy-to-use mobile app, Ferret exclusively uses publicly available data to power its platform, which includes government records and news articles from around the world. Because Ferret is a search engine driven by business-critical risk criteria rather than SEO, the perceived risk of “practical obscurity” with search results is mitigated.
The company is now enabling access to information so that everyone can perform in-depth professional due diligence — identifying risky investments, vendors, partners and customers, and making the best choices for their professional and personal endeavors.
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