Privacy-preserving AI data infrastructure · The Agentic Era

Building the data substrate
agentic AI runs on.

Right now I build three things the next decade of AI needs: enterprise data substrates that turn a company's operational reality into a queryable, bi-temporal knowledge graph; privacy-enhancing techniques that make that data safe to train on; and the agentic traces and trajectories that long-horizon LLMs learn from. The same substrate is going into commercial real estate, healthcare, fintech and beyond — on top of 24 years in global finance and enterprise architecture, and production AI at a $2.4T asset manager.

Fort Lauderdale · NYC · London · Cape Town Founder & CEO, ForwardLane · Builder of Hypebase 8 countries · 5 patents · 24 years shipping
$2.4T
AUM client in production
69.6K
node company universe
40K+
documents modelled
24
years across finance & AI
The work right now

The data layer the next decade of AI needs.

Models are outpacing the data infrastructure underneath them. I build three pieces of the answer — the substrate, the privacy that makes it safe to train on, and the agentic traces models learn from.

Enterprise data substrates
Core
Turning a company's operational reality — code, documents, systems of record — into one queryable, bi-temporal knowledge graph. The company universe models my own firm as ≈69,600 entity-resolved nodes and 500,000+ edges drawn from 40,000+ documents; Hypebase (830K LOC, 96% extraction accuracy) does it for any enterprise across 1,000+ connected apps.
HumanDataHypebaseFalkorDB · bi-temporal
Privacy-enhancing data techniques
Core
Making that substrate safe to train on. Membership-inference testing with LiRA at FPR 10⁻³ against shadow models, Secret-Sharer canaries at controlled rarity, k-anonymity ≥ 5, Wasserstein-1 leakage bands, HMAC-keyed pseudonyms, and PROV-O provenance on every passage — privacy as a measured eval surface, not a downstream gate.
LiRA · Secret-Sharerk-anon ≥ 5differential privacy
Agentic traces & trajectories
Core
The long-horizon training data LLMs actually learn from. 22.9K OpenTelemetry agent traces and 21K embedded passages distilled into task-aligned slices — RLHF trajectories, counterfactual and provenance SFT, code-to-outcome — with a researcher workbench exposing proposeEval, runEvalModel and scoreSliceRecord as first-class agent tools.
22.9K OTel tracesRLHF · SFT sliceseval workbench
Impact

Results, in numbers.

Concrete outcomes from systems running in production — measured, not estimated.

11s
to a sourced, compliance-ready answer — vs a three-week manual baseline
25%
more productive client meetings
32d
average payback period
10×
faster than a custom build
96%
entity-extraction accuracy
8 yrs
in production at Invesco, contracts renewed
84
quarters of consecutive commits
20 min
market lead on quant desks at CQS
Across industries

The same substrate, applied widely.

The data and privacy work is deployed and in engagement across regulated, analog, and frontier sectors alike.

Wealth & asset management
Production
Production at Invesco ($2.4T AUM), against a roster spanning BNP Paribas, Fidelity, AllianceBernstein, Citigroup, AIG, BNY Mellon, Allianz and ABN AMRO. Decision intelligence where compliance is a feature, not a footnote.
Invesco15+ institutions
Healthcare
Building
SecondOpinion — dual-model diagnostic validation (Gemini Pro + MedGemma 27B) across X-ray, MRI and CT, with location-aware specialist matching.
Gemini · MedGemmamedical imaging
Commercial & residential real estate
Engagement
Data-integration and decision-intelligence engagements for analog mid-market operators — commercial real estate, real estate, insurance and law — through SignalHaus.ai and its 5+ sub-brands.
SignalHaus.aianalog mid-market
Fintech & government
Active
Other fintechs via the ForwardLane platform and consulting, plus government — the DHS LRBAA project portal with scoring dashboard and deployment infrastructure.
FintechDHS LRBAA
Active builds

The current workbench.

A live snapshot of what's actually being shipped right now — across knowledge graphs, medical AI, voice, consulting, and the agentic stack. Joy and viability scores are self-rated and updated as projects evolve.

Hypebase
Building · Stealth
Enterprise-grade AI knowledge management. Auto-extracts and structures data from 1000+ connected apps into a searchable knowledge graph. 96% entity-extraction accuracy. LlamaParse + FalkorDB pipeline, multi-agent orchestration, semantic search.
830k LOC 966 commits Joy 90 Viability 75
ForwardLane · Signal Studio
Production · $2.4T AUM
Distribution Intelligence platform for asset managers. Production deployment at Invesco. Now evolving into Signal Studio — an agentic AI workspace with MCP Server, OpenAI AgentKit and Vercel AI SDK integrations. SDK release planned for 2026.
Invesco · daily use MCP · AgentKit SDK 2026
SecondOpinion
Building
AI-powered medical analysis for second opinions on diagnoses. Dual-model validation (Gemini Pro + MedGemma 27B), medical imaging across X-ray / MRI / CT, location-aware specialist matching.
25k LOC Gemini · MedGemma Joy 85
SignalHaus.ai
Active
Independent AI / data-integration consulting practice with 5+ sub-brands. Positioned for analog mid-market — law, insurance, real estate. Holding company for the broader portfolio.
Holding co 5+ sub-brands Joy 75
Ultrafone
Building
Voice-AI product exploring real-time conversational interfaces. Early prototype phase.
15k LOC Voice AI Joy 85
fast-browser-search
OSS · Tool
Browser-native semantic search tool. Pure technical joy — small, fast, sharp; the kind of utility that doesn't need to be monetized to be worth building.
7,136 LOC Joy 90 Open source
NarrativeReactor
Building
A long-form narrative-agent system — agents that reason and write at story length, not just turn length. Early prototype, ambitious surface area.
50k LOC Multi-agent
ContactKiller
Building
A more honest contact manager. Built around what you actually owe the people in your network, not just who they are on LinkedIn.
50k LOC CRM
DHS LRBAA Portal
Government
Project portal for the Department of Homeland Security LRBAA program — scoring dashboard, ranking, and deployment infrastructure.
15k LOC Government Viability 85
Trendpilot.ai
Building
Trend-aware market intelligence. Small, focused codebase moving fast.
15k LOC 30 commits Joy 75
mcp-hubspot
Shipped · OSS
Model Context Protocol server for HubSpot. Small, useful, complete — part of a growing stable of MCP servers built for the agentic stack.
2k LOC 56 commits MCP
Graph Analytics Workshop
Shipped · Research
Teaching material and runnable notebooks for graph analytics in finance and AI — the underpinnings behind the knowledge-graph direction across the portfolio.
Research Education
The arc

A career told in ten chapters.

Each era stacks a layer on the next: economics meets engineering, then quantitative finance, then enterprise architecture, then startups, then AI — and now the agentic, graph-native stack being assembled in the open.

The Foundation
1996 — 2002 · Cape Town
B.BusSci — Economics · Finance · Information Systems
UCT degree combining three disciplines that almost no one else paired — economics with finance with information systems. Brief stint at Old Mutual as business assistant to the Chief Enterprise Architect. The rare cross-section that would define every venture since.
University of Cape Town · Old Mutual · Northwood Boys High School
economicsfinance information-systemssouth-africa
Global Finance
2003 — 2008 · London
BNP Paribas · CQS Ltd SA
Five years in the engine room of global capital. At BNP Paribas: EUR 1.3B cost analysis across 62 locations and 8 business lines; then reporting to the Fixed Income CEO on EUR 650M of global credit — Avis EUR 8BN car-rental securitization, the world-first CMA CGM containership securitization, CDO-squared vehicles, ABS / CDS pricing. Then CQS: a EUR 4BN convertible-arbitrage fund, capital-structure arbitrage, rig-fund oil-debt, CLO I–IV, plus building the real-time trade-screening UX and alpha-testing Bloomberg Big Pipe and the CDS Trading Platform.
BNP Paribas · CQS Ltd SA · Lancaster University · Credit Dream Team
structured-financecredit-derivatives securitizationquantitative-research trading-systems
The Architect
2008 — 2012 · South Africa
JSE · Discovery · Strutt Film
Authored the JSE's five-year technology transformation strategy — directly engaging NYSE, NASDAQ, CME and LSE executives. Replaced the equity trading platform with LSE Group's Millennium IT, provisioned the low-latency colo, established a London point of presence, FIX-translated the derivatives API, and stood up SMART order-routing. Simultaneously founded Strutt Film to bring structured finance to feature-film capital stacks. TOGAF-certified.
Johannesburg Stock Exchange · Discovery Group · Strutt Film
enterprise-architecturetogaf stock-exchangefilm-finance transformation
Creative Ventures
2012 — 2014 · LA → NYC
Matchpoint Music · Inflxion Consulting
Founded Matchpoint Music in LA — analytics to match songs with feature films, a catalog of 20,000 original artists across majors and independents. Then NYC and Inflxion Consulting for early-stage strategy. The analytics-meets-creativity DNA that would later fuel ForwardLane.
Matchpoint Music · Inflxion Consulting
musicfilmanalytics los-angelesnew-york
Startup Genesis
2014 — 2015 · Tribeca
HotelsByDay · ForwardLane founded
Co-founded HotelsByDay in Tribeca — 450 hotels in 45+ cities, tens of thousands of monthly users, and a filed patent on the intra-day reservation system. While operating HBD, launched ForwardLane to bring conversational AI to financial advisors. Two startups in parallel at the height of the NYC scene.
HotelsByDay · ForwardLane
startuphospitality aifintechpatents
The Accelerator Era
2016 — 2017 · Global
Barclays Techstars · FinTech Innovation Labs · IBM Watson · Thomson Reuters
ForwardLane's breakout year. Selected 1 of 10 from 685 applicants for Barclays Techstars London — demo day at the O2 Arena, Thomson Reuters investment, David Magee joins to lead EMEA. Simultaneously selected for the FinTech Innovation Lab in NYC (Accenture / Partnership Fund for NYC) with Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, AIG, Fidelity and AllianceBernstein as mentors. AIG Virtual AI Analyst POC. IBM "Powered by Watson" — solution shown to the CEO of IBM. Stanford GSB Innovation. Expansion across Europe and into Singapore.
ForwardLane · Techstars · Barclays · Partnership Fund NYC · Fintech Sandbox · IBM Watson · Thomson Reuters · Stanford GSB
acceleratorfintech virtual-ai-analystenterprise-sales global-expansion
Enterprise Traction
2018 — 2020 · NYC · Amsterdam · Boston
OppenheimerFunds · ABN AMRO · Morningstar · Salesforce · MIT Sloan
The grinding chapter where POCs turned into revenue. Landed OppenheimerFunds at $20K/month. Partnerships with Morningstar (Investment Conference, 5,000 attendees), IBM, Salesforce (AppExchange listing for ForwardLane Client Insights). ABN AMRO signed a contract — never deployed because the bank couldn't find servers, a hard lesson in enterprise infrastructure. Yale SOM panelist on ML in asset management. CFA Society LA panel with Capital Group. World Economic Forum collaboration on AI in financial services. KPMG/H2 Top-100 Fintech globally. WealthTech100. SEI Ventures and SixThirty strategic investment, $1.9M Seed-2 closed.
OppenheimerFunds · Morningstar · Salesforce · ABN AMRO · MassChallenge · MIT Sloan · Yale SOM · CFA Society LA · WEF · SEI · SixThirty
enterprise-salesrevenue partnershipspocawards
Resilience & Reinvention
2021 — 2024 · NYC → Fort Lauderdale
Invesco · DHS · Microsoft · Platform pivot
Navigated post-COVID and pivoted from the Virtual AI Analyst into a full Distribution Intelligence platform. Invesco became the anchor: $2.4T AUM, production deployment, used daily by distribution teams. White-label "FLX AI" with FLX Distribution. Bridge Financial Technology partnership. Microsoft IP Co-sell Ready with Azure integration. Eric Johnson appointed President, bringing two decades of Oppenheimer/Invesco relationships. Government work begun — DHS LRBAA Project Portal. Moved HQ to Fort Lauderdale.
Invesco · DHS · Microsoft · FLX Distribution · Bridge Financial Technology
distribution-intelligenceproduction governmentresiliencepivot
The Agentic Era
2025 — present · Fort Lauderdale
Hypebase · Signal Studio · SignalHaus.ai · 18+ independent builds
The explosion. Hypebase — a stealth knowledge-graph platform: 830,000 LOC, 966 commits, 96% entity-extraction accuracy, 1000+ app integrations via Pipedream, LlamaParse + FalkorDB pipeline, multi-agent orchestration. Signal Studio — agentic AI workspace. SignalHaus.ai — independent consulting practice for analog industries. Plus medical AI (SecondOpinion), voice AI (Ultrafone), narrative agents (NarrativeReactor), browser-native search (fast-browser-search), and a stable of MCP servers. Building in public, with the tools of the next decade.
Hypebase · ForwardLane (Signal Studio) · SignalHaus.ai
agentic-aiknowledge-graphs mcpmulti-agent builderopen-source
Selected milestones

Things actually shipped.

A condensed timeline of roles, accelerators, deals and recognition — independently verifiable wherever possible.

2003 — 2005 · London
Global Cost Analyst — Fixed Income
BNP Paribas
EUR 1.3B budget across US, EMEA, Asia. Re-engineered MIS for 62 locations and 8 business lines.
2005 — 2006 · London
Global Credit Analyst — Fixed Income
BNP Paribas · Reporting to CEO & Excom
  • Avis EUR 8BN securitization of 8 car-rental pools
  • World-first CMA CGM containership securitization
  • BNP Paribas CDO-Squared investment vehicles
  • Member of the "Credit Dream Team"
2006 — 2008
Quantitative Analyst — Quantitative Research
CQS Ltd SA
  • EUR 4BN Convertible Arbitrage fund
  • EUR 1BN Capital Structure Arbitrage fund
  • Built real-time multi-market trade-screening UI
  • Alpha-tester · Bloomberg Big Pipe & CDS Trading Platform
2009 — 2011 · Johannesburg
Strategy / Business Architect — Enterprise Architecture
Johannesburg Stock Exchange
  • Authored 5-year JSE technology transformation strategy
  • Replaced equity platform with LSE Group Millennium IT
  • Low-latency colocation · London point of presence · SMART order-routing
  • Direct engagement with NYSE, NASDAQ, CME & LSE executives
2014 — 2015 · Tribeca
Co-founder — HotelsByDay
Patent filed · 450 hotels · 45+ cities
2014 — present · NYC → Fort Lauderdale
Founder & CEO — ForwardLane Inc.
AI-driven Distribution Intelligence for asset managers
  • Production deployment at Invesco · $2.4T AUM
  • Built the Virtual AI Analyst — conversational portfolio optimization
  • Signal Studio · MCP Server · OpenAI AgentKit · Vercel AI SDK
  • SDK release planned 2026
2016 · London
Barclays Techstars London Accelerator
1 of 10 from 685 applicants · O2 Arena demo day
2016 · NYC
FinTech Innovation Lab — Accenture & Partnership Fund for NYC
6th Annual cohort · 16 financial-institution mentors
2016 — 2017
IBM "Powered by Watson" — Solution shown to IBM CEO
Thomson Reuters investment · AIG Virtual AI Analyst POC
2018 · New York
OppenheimerFunds — First major enterprise revenue
$20,000 / month recurring
2019 · Salesforce AppExchange
ForwardLane Client Insights — live on AppExchange
Only Insights Automation partner in wealth & asset management on Financial Services Cloud
2020 · January
SEI Ventures Strategic Investment · $1.9M Seed-2
SixThirty Global Fintech Fund follow-on
2024 · September
Eric Johnson appointed President of ForwardLane
Two decades at OppenheimerFunds / Invesco
2025 — present · Fort Lauderdale
Founder — Stealth Knowledge-Graph Platform (Hypebase)
830k LOC · 96% entity extraction · 1000+ integrations
2025 · October — present
DHS LRBAA Project Portal
Department of Homeland Security · scoring dashboard & deployment infra
Speaking & press

On stage and in print.

A decade featured on AI in wealth and asset management — across academia, industry conferences, and major financial media.

Academia & teaching
Lead instructor, Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs — “Next-Gen Advantage: AI at the Core.” Featured speaker on AI in wealth & asset management at MIT, Yale International School of Finance, and the World Economic Forum.
HarvardMIT · YaleWEF
Press & features
Quoted in Forbes (“AI and Machine Learning Will Transform Wealth Management”); featured by Institutional Investor, Euromoney, Thomson Reuters, and WealthManagement.com.
ForbesInstitutional InvestorEuromoney
Recognition

Education, awards & credentials.

Education & Executive Programs

  • 2020MIT Sloan Executive Education — Mastering Negotiation and Influence
  • 2016Stanford GSB — Innovation Program
  • 2010The Open Group — TOGAF 9 · Certified Enterprise Architect
  • 2006Lancaster University — Advanced Credit Derivatives with T.S. Ho
  • 1996—2001University of Cape Town — B.BusSci · Economics, Finance & Information Systems

Awards, Rankings & Investment

  • 2023Banking Tech Awards USA — Finalist, “FinTech of the Future: Data & Insights”
  • 2023AI Hot 100 — selected for the AI Hot 100 List
  • 2023Microsoft — IP Co-sell Ready (Azure AI partnership)
  • 2020KPMG / H2 Ventures — Top 100 Fintech globally · WealthTech100
  • 2020Bridge Financial Technology — strategic partnership (RIAs & broker-dealers)
  • 2014—20$10M raised from leading investors — SEI Ventures, SixThirty
  • 2018—19World Economic Forum — AI in Financial Services collaboration
  • 2018Yale SOM & Morningstar — ML-in-asset-management panel; conference beta to ~5,000
  • 2016Barclays Techstars London — 1 of 10 from 685 applicants
  • 2016FinTech Innovation Lab — Accenture / Partnership Fund for NYC
  • 2016—17IBM “Powered by Watson” — solution shown to the IBM CEO
  • 2015HotelsByDay — Patent: intra-day reservations system
Partners & ecosystem
InvescoMicrosoftOracle SnowflakeBridge Financial Technology SixThirtySEI Ventures FinTech Innovation LabMassChallenge FinTech Techstars
Now — May 2026

Building the knowledge-graph layer the agentic era will need.

The thesis is simple: software is collapsing into agents, agents need real memory, and real memory means graphs. Hypebase is the bet — auditable, real-time industry intelligence stitched from 1000+ connected sources. ForwardLane's Signal Studio is the production proof. SignalHaus.ai is the front door for mid-market companies that need the same advantage. Twenty-four years has been one long preparation for this.

Contact

Best ways to reach me.

I read short, direct messages first. If you're working on knowledge graphs, agentic systems, distribution intelligence in asset management, or AI in regulated industries — say hello.

nathan.stevenson@forwardlane.com LinkedIn ForwardLane SignalHaus.ai