Founding
Credmark was founded in 2018 in a remote mountainside village in Italy. Paul, one of our founders, was living there with his wife, child, and innumerable farm animals.
Neil, the other founder, was living in Texas, very far from any farm animals. Paul used to live in Austin where he and Neil met for breakfast every other week. Cryptocurrencies and smart contracts were frequent topics of conversation.
One day Neil decided to visit Paul to discuss building and global peer-to-peer lending platform on crypto rails. This seemed like a great idea, until they looked for credit data.
And that’s why Credmark was born.
Early Days
A few months later, Credmark (Graychain at the time) was accepted into a blockchain accelerator in Hong Kong.
Crypto is global, so we decided to structure Credmark accordingly. We needed to work in Asia and North America / Europe at the same time. Not normal for a two-person startup!
Austin is too far from Europe, so Neil moved to New York to be in the thick of traditional financial services, and within striking-distance of Chicago and London.
Remote Italian villages aren’t currently hotbeds of crypto activity so Paul moved to Bangkok to be within striking-distance of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Fun fact: more people live in his current apartment building than in the town from which he moved.
Today
As we’ve grown we’ve kept our global focus while paying attention to where we see crypto developing and where we find people prepared for this emerging world.
As a result, finance, design, and cyber-security are based in London.
Nairobi is also an important center for us as Kenya’s embrace of M-Pesa makes it the epicenter of alternative finance on the African continent.
Paul Murphy CEO | Founder
Paul was born in Argentina. He grew up in France, Italy, and America. He’s been lucky enough to work in New York, London, Buenos Aires, Zug, and a few other places. He used to write a lot of code. Now he’s kind of rusty. He does whatever needs doing, whether or not it’s fun.
In his spare time Paul participates in several activities that make his vegetarian friends unhappy. He firmly believes that the answer to most questions can be found in musical and opera scores.
Neil Zumwalde CTO | Founder
Neil was born in a state of sanity called Minnesota. His parents taught him never to trust fast-talking people from the coasts, which has served him well. Neil moved to Austin because he was tired of being cold.
In his spare time he writes music for a pretty famous band, performs with several less famous bands, and has more ideas per hour than normal people have in a lifetime.
Momin Ahmad Founder
Momin is Credmark’s secret weapon. He is versatile, a quick study, largely unflappable, and usually in a good mood after 10AM. Besides being responsible for the development of some of Credmark’s projects, Momin is the lead analyst for our Crypto Credit Report.
A UT graduate with a focus in philosophy, Momin somehow managed to pick up all sorts of useful skills between music gigs and basketball games.
Blair Worrall Advisor
Blair began his career in public accounting at PricewaterhouseCoopers and later joined Dow Jones & Company, Inc. In 2004 he joined Moody’s where he worked in finance, audit, and ratings operations. Based on his understanding of global ratings operations combined with an ever-deepening interest in crypto, Blair is serving as an advisor as we develop critical products for our corporate customers.
When not working, Blair enjoys spending time at the New Jersey shore, and playing golf and pickle ball.
Serge Ugarte Advisor
Serge is both a rare bird and an odd duck.
Serge started his career as a management consultant in the Fintech space. Unfortunately the Global Management Consultant’s Union, a very secretive organization, kicked him out for being too smart, too hands-on, and too practical.
In 1998 Serge noticed that the Internet was really starting to get some traction, so he went to work for Cisco. He helped them navigate the post-crash world by selling hardware to companies that knew how to make money. Hands-on and practical turned out to be useful after all. In early 2010 Serge was recruited to lead Global Business Development at FICO. For a variety of reasons he also worked very closely with FICO’s Corporate Development division. His time there proved once again that competence is almost always rewarded with more work.
Today, Serge lives and breathes crypto, but keeps it quiet from friends and family who wouldn’t understand how he could have strayed so far from a respectable career. He did tell his wife, however, when he realized that someone he trusts needed to be able to recover his hardware wallet.
Alberto Ornaghi
Father of two, husband, tech fanboy. He started his career as an opensource programmer, employed as security engineer, became a professional programmer, a software architect and a CTO. Then he jumped in the blackhole of becoming a startup co-founder in his forties. He co-founded Neutrino, a blockchain analytics company recently sold to Coinbase.
He is a big fan of agile programming and fast decision making, he will always fight for the KISS (keep it simple stupid) rule. He has a deep knowledge of the blockchain patterns and dynamics and happy to help credmark applying his knowledge to their product.
In his spare time he like to play with his sons, going on holiday with his wife and running 150 Km a month.
Join us
These are the areas that always need beefing up.
- Software development
- Machine learning
- Blockchain
- Consumer credit
- Corporate credit
- Enterprise sales
