The CEO of Detected did not spend a decade in financial crime before founding a compliance company. That, his backers now argue, is precisely why the company works. On paper, Liam Chennells should not be running one of the most-watched compliance platforms in the world. He is not a former regulator. He has no years in AML enforcement, no tour through the Big Four consultancies, no decade at a legacy vendor. Before July 2020, he had never held a job in the compliance industry.
What he had done was leave high school and go straight into playing rugby in both England and New Zealand rather than head to college, then years at the bottom of the sales ladder in a classic cold-calling role. Things progressed into a sales leadership role at eCommerce player Tryzens, a commercial run through eBay, the fashion-tech business Anatwine that Zalando acquired in 2018, and a managing director seat at a cross-border courier software company in San Francisco. He then took a sabbatical and returned to England at the start of 2020.
Five and a half years later, Detected, the platform he co-founded with his former Tryzens colleague Peter Youell in the middle of the pandemic, verifies individuals and businesses in over 190 countries for customers including Thomson Reuters, Bet365, Gumtree, XE.com, and Weatherbys Bank. Its anchor partner is GBG, the FTSE-listed identity group, which licensed the platform under a five-year white-label agreement and pointed its 20,000 customers at it. Dun & Bradstreet, the leading global provider of business decisioning data, signed a strategic alliance with Detected in October 2025. ComplyAdvantage, the financial-crime data leader, partnered with Detected on KYB in November 2024. Thomson Reuters uses the product, and its ventures arm has invested in the company.
The investment behind all of this is just over $10 million. Detected has been placed #1 in the RegTech 50. Platforms with similar capabilities are routinely acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars. Chennells is competing against a roster of incumbent providers on a fraction of their capital, and so far, he is winning. He is also, increasingly, the person the industry picks up the phone to.
Expertise as a Cage
The standard founder story in regulated markets is that you spend fifteen years inside the system before you earn the right to build something new. It is a story that flatters industry veterans and mostly produces slightly better versions of what already exists. Chennells is the counter-case. He walked into compliance with no sacred cows, no mental model to protect, and no patience for the processes some of the world’s biggest companies had quietly accepted as “the way it is.” He replaced those assumptions with something insiders rarely used against their own market: unfiltered curiosity. Ignorance, used well, turns out to be an asset. It forces first principles. It denies the comfort of borrowed answers. In a market where the incumbents sell either KYC or KYB, never both, never unified, never global, Detected produced the only platform that does all three at scale.
A Fraud Problem and a Phone Call
The idea surfaced in July 2020, inside a pandemic economy awash with PPE fraud. Chennells was, due to personal tragedy, trying to understand why PPE and medical equipment were moving around the world so slowly. The businesses behind cargo shipments could not be verified quickly enough to ensure the supply chain kept up with demand. A bottleneck caused by something unexpected, it was incredibly difficult to find reliable data on private companies, particularly across borders. The information was either missing or locked inside fragmented registries nobody had bothered to stitch together. The only answer was for compliance teams to email the owners of these businesses and ask them to fill in the gaps. Yes, really. It was an operational and plumbing problem hiding in plain sight, worth billions in lost onboarding and missed fraud, and the industry had drifted around it for decades.
He called Peter Youell, a technologist and close friend he had worked with at the e-commerce systems integrator Tryzens eight years earlier, and described what he was seeing. Youell became Detected’s CTO and Co-Founder and started building.
The first two years were unglamorous. Chennells read regulations, constantly cold-called compliance officers, and sat in real onboarding meetings, watching teams run global KYB cases on spreadsheets. His lack of background meant he could sit in those rooms and ask the questions insiders no longer asked. Why a fourteen-day onboarding turnaround was acceptable, why a global bank used five vendors to answer one question, why UBO thresholds varied from 5 percent to 25 percent across jurisdictions, and whose problem that was.
The answers, pieced together, became the product. Liam and Pete have been obsessed with refusing to accept “the way it has always been done” and simplifying everything they can.
Turning Up, Day After Day
Ask Chennells what separates founders who make it from the ones who don’t, and the answer is unromantic. “Grit beats talent, a network, or anything else,” he says. Every morning since the middle of 2020, he has started the day with the same opening move: the conviction that Detected will be the number one name in KYB. Payroll panics, product setbacks, the occasional pitch that fell apart at the last meeting, none of it changes the opening move. The logic underneath is almost mathematical. As a founder, you will make the wrong decision often, so the only defense is volume. Create enough opportunities for good decisions that the bad ones get diluted out. Detected’s cadence of constant new feature releases, while a well-funded rival in the same space lists “adding a new credit provider” as its six-month roadmap, is a direct expression of that thesis.
The Evidence
Aside from the awards, Detected counts partnerships with payments giants like Visa and a global customer base spanning public-market operators, global payment service providers, fintechs, and consumer platforms whose logos are recognizable at a glance. What that customer base reflects is a product built to handle the technical and regulatory complexity modern compliance work demands.
The GBG partnership is the tell. GBG is an FTSE 250 global powerhouse of the compliance industry. It ended up licensing Detected’s platform under an initial three-year deal, which was later extended to a five-year white-label deal. That is the behavior of a mature organization that has surveyed the market and decided the new entrant is running ahead of the incumbents.
Discipline Dressed as Curiosity
The magic-of-ignorance thesis is, underneath, a discipline thesis. Chennells did not arrive with nothing to recommend him beyond fresh eyes. He brought a decade of commercial operating experience at eBay, Zalando-acquired Anatwine, and EasyPost, along with a sporting background that taught him what standards look like under pressure. In July 2023, he rollerbladed 500 miles from Edinburgh to London in five days, six hours, and five minutes, setting the world record for the distance and raising tens of thousands for Future Frontiers, a charity for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. It was, in part, he has said, a way to prove to himself that he could do what he was asking his team to do, namely, turn up day after day, after the novelty had gone.
The same discipline sits underneath and throughout Detected. The curiosity was not an accident of inexperience. It was a deliberate decision to treat every assumption in the industry as a hypothesis worth testing. The absence of a compliance CV was a license, perhaps the only license, to do it.
Nobody Is Coming to Save You
One of the more counterintuitive lessons of the last five years, Chennells has said, is that almost nobody cares. Not cruelly, just factually. Early investors wrote cheques they could afford to lose, and they wrote them as investments, not gifts. Big customer announcements get scrolled past. Partnership news from companies the size of Visa or Thomson Reuters earns a brief congratulations and then disappears beneath the next post in the feed. The reframing is liberating rather than deflating. If the business and its founder are, as he puts it, irrelevant in most people’s lives, the savage self-imposed pressure eases, and the work becomes the thing again. It is not a nihilistic view. It is the view of someone who has stopped performing for an audience that was never watching and started building for the handful of customers, partners, and colleagues who were.
The Lesson
The industries most in need of reinvention are those that have most aggressively gatekept outsiders. KYB is one. Healthcare tooling is another. Insurance underwriting, government procurement, and the entire layer of B2B infrastructure that treats tenure as the primary credential are all waiting for someone to wander in without the baggage.
Chennells’ answer to founders staring at those markets is uncomplicated. Accept the fact that you do not know anything and fully commit to learning. Read the regulations until you understand them better than the regulators. Find the partner who has built the hard thing for twenty years. Then ask every question the industry has forgotten to ask, and outwork everyone already there. Ignorance, on its own, is a liability. Paired with curiosity that never turns off and standards that do not slip, it is the rarest kind of competitive advantage. The kind your competitors cannot buy.
