Calvin Risk: The Venture Leader Fintech developing AI governance and quality assurance software for AI systems

29.09.2025 09:00, Rita Longobardi

Meet Anastasia Movcharenko, VP of Calvin Risk. The Fintech startup offers AI risk management software for testing, governance, and profiling. In November, Anastasia and the other nine Swiss National Fintech Team members will fly to London on a business development and investor roadshow.

Name: Anastasia Movcharenko
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
Nationality: Switzerland/Russia
Graduated from: University of St. Gallen
Job title: VP, Strategic Customer Relationships
Number of employees: 16
Money raised: USD 7.25M (CHF 5.8M)


Can you tell us who your product or solution helps, and how?
Calvin Risk helps insurers and banks adopt AI confidently. Our governance platform offers standardized testing and lifecycle management for predictive and generative AI. Business leaders gain clear dashboards for transparent AI performance and risk, enabling faster, evidence-based decisions. Technical teams get tools to evaluate and monitor models across 50+ risk metrics, including bias, hallucinations, robustness, and adversarial attacks. By combining visibility with actionable metrics, Calvin Risk helps organizations meet compliance, improve model performance, and safely scale AI.

What market are you addressing and what is the potential of your startup in that market?
Calvin addresses the urgent needs for AI governance and quality assurance in financial services. As insurers and banks adopt AI at speed, many still rely on fragmented, manual processes that can’t scale or meet regulatory expectations. With around 9’000 large (over 250 employees) financial institutions across our current geographic focus of Europe, we offer a validated, centralized platform to tackle the industry’s needs.

How and where did you come up with the idea for your startup?
Calvin Risk was founded by CEO Julian Riebartsch and CTO Syang Zhou to address AI risks systematically. Syang, formerly at PwC, helped banks and insurers like UBS and Generali deploy AI safely, revealing the challenges of scaling it. Julian, in DeepTech venture capital, saw startups struggle to turn AI pilots into value. Drawing on Syang’s ETH Zurich research on secure AI in finance, they created Calvin Risk.
 
What do you expect from the Venture Leaders roadshow, and how do you think it will help you achieve your vision?
Through the roadshow, we aim to accelerate our expansion into the UK by connecting with Venture Lab's intensely innovative network financial institutions and partners. Building on our success in the DACH region, this program offers a key opportunity to establish Calvin Risk as a trusted AI governance and testing solution in one of Europe’s most advanced financial markets and engage with the participating UK financial institutions facing the real-world challenges of scaling AI.

What are your team’s key achievements to date?
Some of our key achievements include the enterprise-ready deployment of our solution, securing a $4M seed round in November 2024, launching our platform with leading financial institutions, and receiving a $1.75M Innosuisse grant in 2025 supporting our ‘Validating AI Models & Quantifying Their Risk in Commercial Solutions’ project. These milestones position us to scale our platform, deepen technical and academic leadership, and drive AI adoption across the financial sector.

Is there a key principle or value that guides you as you build your company?
At Calvin Risk, we believe that trust is earned through clarity. We apply this not only to how our platform makes AI risks transparent for clients, but also to how we build as a team — by filtering advice carefully, focusing on meaningful insights, and trusting each other to steer the ship instead of micromanaging every detail.

What is the most important lesson you have learned as a founder?
One key lesson is that validation in B2B enterprise is almost an extreme sport. Sales cycles in regulated industries can outlast a startup’s runway, meaning you often need to commit to your vision without the luxury of immediate market feedback. Learning to balance conviction with adaptability has been critical for us.

What is your favorite productivity hack or tool and why?
Our best productivity “hack” is actually a principle: trust your team and resist the urge to over-manage. The less time spent in the weeds of every small detail, the more focus there is on steering the company in the right direction. It keeps us aligned and prevents us from drowning in the daily noise.

What was your dream job when you were a child?
As kids, we dreamed of being scientists and explorers — driven by curiosity and the desire to solve big, meaningful problems. That mindset continues to guide us as we navigate the fast-changing, often unpredictable world of AI.