New startup ideas · Fintech · Fintech
startup idea
Attestry
The global registry that stops government payments to impostor suppliers.
Attestry is a shared registry of verified government suppliers and their real bank accounts: before a treasury or municipality releases a payment, its ERP checks the payee against the registry through a no-code integration.
- Software subscription
- Government and public sector
- $1-10B market
- Network effects, winner takes most
- Global from day one
3/5
venture judge
1
similar startups, last 2 years (20 all-time)
95%
of 3 nearest real companies still alive
yes
6 matching federal grants and programs
Direction supported by government programs and grants
Test it before you build it
$1,000 · 6 weeks · 20 prospects
Proves mid-size city and county treasuries will issue purchase orders for payee verification this budget year under micro-purchase authority, for $1,000 in six weeks
Riskiest assumption · A mid-size city or county finance director who has seen an impostor-payment attempt will buy a payee-verification pilot this budget year under existing micro-purchase authority, alone, without waiting for other governments to join the registry or for a formal RFP
1Focus group: who and where
The finance director or treasurer of a US city or county of 50,000 to 500,000 residents whose office has seen a vendor-impersonation or bank-account-change fraud attempt in the last two years, and who can approve purchases under roughly $5,000 without a competitive bid
where to find 20 · GFOA state chapters and their membership rolls (the association every one of these buyers belongs to), the ELGL community and its Slack (where local-government finance staff actually talk shop), Tyler Technologies ERP user groups and forums (the channel reaching the dominant local-government ERP install base), and counties' own published vendor-payment files (a directory for picking targets that provably publish what fraudsters exploit)
2Sell first, build later
A payment-fraud pilot: Attestry verifies your top 500 suppliers and their real bank accounts within 30 days of kickoff, delivers the verified-payee list your AP team checks before every release, and reserves your jurisdiction a founding seat in the first five-member cross-jurisdiction registry cohort
the ask · $4,500 per jurisdiction for the pilot, deliberately priced under typical micro-purchase thresholds; $9,000 per year subscription afterward at a founding rate locked three years
a real yes · A real yes is an issued purchase order or a paid invoice; a director saying 'we need this', an unpaid trial of the report, or a request to present to the county board next quarter are not yeses
3Small experiments
The first one attacks the riskiest assumption; each ends with a number that says whether to run the next.
1. Finance director fraud interviews
$400 · 14 days
Book 20 calls with finance directors recruited through GFOA state chapter rolls and ELGL. Ask two questions: has your office seen an impostor-vendor or bank-change fraud attempt in the last 24 months, and what can you buy under your micro-purchase or small-purchase threshold without an RFP. The second question is the kill question, because the card's stated risk is procurement outlasting runway.
keep going if · 10 of 20 report an attempted or successful impostor payment in the last 24 months AND confirm sign-off authority under $5,000 without a competitive bid
2. Sample verified-payee report demo
$300 · 10 days
Pull one target county's published vendor-payment file, verify its top 100 vendors by hand against secretary of state records and independent call-backs to numbers you source yourself, and package the result as a branded verified-payee report with the mismatches flagged. Demo it to 15 of the interviewed directors as exactly what their $4,500 pilot delivers for their top 500 suppliers.
keep going if · 5 of 15 demos end with the finance director asking for a quote to send to purchasing
3. Micro-purchase PO collection
$300 · 21 days
Send each interested director a complete quote packet priced at $4,500: scope, W-9, certificate of insurance, and a fill-in justification memo for their file, then register in their vendor portals the same week. Count issued purchase orders, not verbal approvals, and log every jurisdiction where the quote gets routed into a formal RFP instead.
keep going if · 3 purchase orders issued within 21 days of the first quote going out
4Collect a deposit up front
Tesla took $1,000 refundable reservations for the Model 3 and $100 for the Cybertruck before building either: the deposit is the measurement, not the revenue.
$0
no cash yet: take a signed commitment
how · An issued purchase order for the $4,500 pilot, signed under the jurisdiction's micro-purchase or small-purchase authority by the finance director, with the invoice payable at kickoff; public treasuries cannot credibly wire deposits before a vendor is onboarded, so the PO with a dated kickoff is the money-equivalent commitment, and the $4,500 price exists precisely to fit under the no-bid threshold set up: Stripe Invoicing ↗
what it reserves · A founding seat in the first five-jurisdiction registry cohort, their top 500 suppliers verified first, and the $4,500 pilot price locked as a $9,000-per-year founding subscription rate for three years
refund · The order can be cancelled in writing at no charge any time before kickoff, and the invoice is voided if verification is not delivered within 30 days of kickoff
target · 3 issued purchase orders from 20 finance-director conversations within 45 days
before taking money · Government purchasing rules apply: confirm each jurisdiction's micro-purchase threshold before quoting, never split invoices to stay under it, and handle supplier bank-account data only under a written data-security addendum.
Go: build it if
3 purchase orders issued from 20 conversations within 6 weeks, with at least 10 of 20 directors reporting a recent impostor attempt
Kill: stop if
Fewer than 5 of 20 directors report any impostor attempt in the last 24 months, or 0 purchase orders with every interested buyer routing the $4,500 into an RFP cycle longer than 90 days
5 Scripts to run itoutreach message, landing copy, deposit terms · click to open
outreach message
Your office publishes its vendor list and payment calendar because the law requires it, and that is exactly what fraudsters use to impersonate your real suppliers and redirect payments. I verify your top 500 suppliers and their actual bank accounts, and your AP team checks every payment against the verified list before release, with no ERP project. The pilot is $4,500, under most micro-purchase thresholds. Can I take 20 minutes to show you the verified-payee report I built from a county's published vendor file?
landing page
Stop paying impostors pretending to be your vendors $4,500 pilot: your top 500 suppliers and their bank accounts verified within 30 days Request a quote packet for purchasing
deposit terms
This pilot order commits $4,500, payable on invoice at kickoff after your purchase order is issued, for verification of your top 500 suppliers and their bank accounts within 30 days. It reserves your jurisdiction a founding seat in the first five-member registry cohort, with the founding subscription rate locked for three years. Cancel in writing any time before kickoff at no charge; if we miss the 30-day delivery, the invoice is voided.
Would you run this test?
One tap. The yes-share feeds the Demand pillar of this idea's score; nobody sees who answered.
Budgets are out-of-pocket estimates for a team of one to three, US market. Size the deposit to the deal, and check the terms before taking money in a regulated line.
Scorecard
One score that balances how trendy the idea is, the demand for it and its potential for 100x, with competition measured relative to every other idea in the catalog. Recent startup trends first, government priorities second.
77
Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 48.0 x 1.61
Warm
competition: more crowded than 20% of ideas · headwind x0.90
+1.9
government priorities, secondary (5 matching grants)
Trend
46
Is the wave forming now? 2025-26 entrants vs 2023-24, rounds since 2025, the sector's live-batch direction, the 2026 trend analyst.
- Entrants 2025-26 vs 2023-24 (similar companies)23
- Rounds announced 2025+ in the sector87
- Sector direction (live batch)50
- 2026 trend analyst25
Demand
52
Does anyone want it? YC's current RFS, companies already paid for something similar, the operator judge, founders' yes-rate in decks, readers who would run the test.
- YC asks for it (current RFS: idea / sector)30
- Someone already pays (similar companies, recent / all-time)100
- Operator judge: real pain25
100x potential
56
Can it return a fund? The venture judge (double weight), market-size and moat axes, neighbours still alive, the technologist judge.
- Venture judge50
- Market size axis33
- Moat axis100
- Neighbours still alive79
- Technologist judge25
Score = 100 x cbrt(Trend x Demand x 100x) x (1 - 0.5 x crowding) + government bonus (max 5), calibrated so the 95th-percentile idea scores 90 (order never changes). A geometric mean: a weak pillar cannot be papered over. Percentiles are among the 272 ideas in the catalog; the terms matched were global, registry, stops, government, payments, impostor, suppliers, shared.
The idea in full
- What
- Attestry is a shared registry of verified government suppliers and their real bank accounts: before a treasury or municipality releases a payment, its ERP checks the payee against the registry through a no-code integration. A supplier verified once by any member government is trusted by every other member, and Attestry's ops team does the verification legwork that individual finance offices cannot. It is sold as an annual subscription to public treasuries through the eprocurement and ERP integrators that already hold those relationships.
- Why now
- Effectiv AI, a fraud-orchestration platform aimed at financial institutions, went inactive in 2024, and today 7 of the last two years' companies still pitch 'financial institutions' while none in the brief sells payment fraud protection to the public sector - governments, which publish their vendor lists and payment calendars, are the most impersonated and least defended payers.
- Wedge: first customer and entry point
- A two-person team signs five mid-size city and county treasuries through one government ERP reseller, verifying just their top 500 suppliers each, and publishes the first cross-jurisdiction verified-payee list.
- Path to 100x
- Government payment-integrity and vendor-verification software is a $1-10B market, and a registry is winner-takes-most by construction: every verified supplier makes the network more valuable to every unjoined government, and every joined government makes verification free for thousands of suppliers. The 100x case is Attestry becoming the default payee-trust layer wired into government ERPs worldwide through channel partners, with the verified entity-to-bank-account graph as a data asset no second registry can rebuild.
- Ceiling
- National governments mandating their own domestic registries would fragment the network into country silos and cap Attestry as a mid-size integrator of registries rather than the registry.
- Closest real companies, as the generator saw them
- CRS Group positions as the single platform for credit, fraud, and compliance for financial institutions, not governments; Effectiv AI (inactive 2024) orchestrated bank fraud tools; Analog Financial automates compliance-sensitive money movement for private parties, not a public payee registry.
- Main risk
- Public procurement cycles are slow enough that the registry may run out of runway before it reaches the density that makes membership self-evident.
Five judges
Each judge scores every idea in the catalog with a named rubric; the venture judge decides whether a card is shown at all (4-5 is venture-grade).
Venture investor
3/5
Registry network effects are real, but public procurement cycles are slow enough that the card itself names runway as the binding constraint.
Bootstrapper
2/5
Manual verification of 500 suppliers per treasury is field-ops labor against public procurement cycles the card itself admits may outlast runway.
Operator
2/5
The registry is worthless until many governments join, so it needs the whole public sector to move first through multi-year procurement cycles.
Technologist
2/5
The verification legwork is a manual ops team and the integration is a no-code ERP payee check, so the registry data is the only asset.
Risk
3/5
Diversified across many public treasuries with no license needed, though channel access sits with government ERP resellers and procurement cycles may outlast runway.
trends
2/5
Why-now is an empty-field claim built on Effectiv AI's 2024 death; nothing in 2025-2026 newly enables a supplier registry that was buildable years ago.
Similar startups in the directory
Companies whose pitch matches most of the idea's terms (global, registry, stops, government, payments, impostor, suppliers, shared): 20 all-time, 1 from the last two years. Same matching as Idea Check.
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The generator's reference companies
Real companies the model named as closest when it wrote the card, with their fate. A check mark is a company the radar could verify in its directory.
Public money in this direction
US federal grants, SBIR/STTR awards and open opportunities from the radar's public-money feed, matched to the idea's terms; the sector totals give the context.
6
grants and programs matching the idea
2
startup-relevant grants in Fintech
$809K
awarded in the sector, tracked
National Science Foundation · NSF Engines - Type 2, Special Projects · $15M · posted 2026-07-13
- Mid-scale RI-1 (M1: DA): Designing Scalable Community-driven Infrastructure to Support Biodiversity Genomics (SCIBG).awardmedium relevance
National Science Foundation · Cross-BIO Activities, Mid-scale RI - Track 1 · $12M · posted 2026-09-14
- Collaborative Research: Enhancing Stochastic Supply Chains via Cascading Simulation and Adjustable Optimizationawardmedium relevance
National Science Foundation · OE Operations Engineering · $316K · posted 2026-08-17
- Collaborative Research: Enhancing Stochastic Supply Chains via Cascading Simulation and Adjustable Optimizationawardmedium relevance
National Science Foundation · OE Operations Engineering · $131K · posted 2026-08-17
- CAREER: Improving Road Safety and Supporting Infrastructure through Responsible Use of Driving Dataawardmedium relevance
National Science Foundation · ISP-Infrastructre Systms & Ppl, CAREER: FACULTY EARLY CAR DEV · $609K · posted 2026-07-20
- POSE: Phase I: Building an Open-Source Ecosystem for Spatial Multi-Scale and Multi-Omics Data Scienceawardmedium relevance
National Science Foundation · POSE · $300K · posted 2026-07-16
Market signal
What the radar sees in Fintech: new companies by cohort year, the forming YC batch, and outcomes since the February snapshot.
Fintech · 256 → 148 → 186 → 125 → 99 new companies 2022 → 2026 · 89% aliveYC F26 live: 7 in this cluster, 6% of the batch (was 5% in S26)Since February, of 592 YC companies here: 11 acquired, 8 shut down, 56 rewrote their pitch
Design attributes
The card is one cell of a designed set: every axis below was chosen before the text was written, and the text had to realize it.
- Buyer
- Government and public sector
- Business model
- Software subscription
- Path to 100x
- Network effects, winner takes most
- Market size
- $1-10B market
- Capital intensity
- Capital-medium (ops, field teams)
- Speed to revenue
- Revenue in 1-3 years
- Technical depth
- Integrations, no-code
- Go-to-market
- Partners and channels
- Moat
- Data moat
- Geography
- Global from day one
- Regulation
- Some regulation
- Vibe
- Hot space
Listed under
An idea sits in its own sector and in any sector its text clearly touches.
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