Why nowThe thesis

The internet made it easy to send money. AI made it easy to impersonate the person asking.

Veto exists because the moment of action — when an office moves settlement funds — is now the least defensible step in the entire transaction. We're building the control layer for it.

$3.04B
lost to business email compromise in 2025 — the #2 cybercrime category by dollars.
86%
of BEC losses moved by wire or ACH — fast, and often unrecoverable once sent.
$275M
in reported real-estate fraud losses across 12,368 complaints in 2025.
~30%
of title companies reported an attempted BEC attack in a single year.

Sources: FBI IC3 2025 Internet Crime Report; ALTA / industry reporting. Figures are reported losses and understate true exposure.

The shift

The defense that worked was “spot the awkward email.” AI removed the tells.

Until recently

Fraud left fingerprints.

Misspelled domains, broken grammar, a stranger's phrasing. Training staff to notice the seams was a real, if imperfect, line of defense. Verification vendors and email rules caught more.

Now

The email looks right. The voice on the phone matches.

Generative tools draft messages in a colleague's exact style and clone a voice for the confirmation call. When the request looks and sounds authentic, human detection fails — and it's designed to.

The insight

The problem was never missing data. It's that evidence is mutable, and the moment of action treats it as if it were proof.

A check passed. A document arrived. A signature is on file. A callback was made. Each of these is a source — it supports a claim. None of them is permission to move money. Treating a source as truth is exactly the gap an impersonator steps into, at exactly the moment funds are about to leave.

Permission to act is not a document. It's an office state — created by policy, evidence, source limitations, role, timing, and record. That state either exists at the moment of action, or it doesn't. Today, almost no office can show, after the fact, the state it actually relied on.

So the file should show what the office relied on before it acted. That sentence is the whole product.

Veto requires a current Review Record — sources, limitations, and a recorded exception path — before a covered money instruction proceeds. When a material value changes after sign-off, the record goes stale and the action is blocked. The green path takes under a minute. The exception path is impossible to hide.

— Veto Company Thesis

What we believe

A few convictions we won't trade away.

01

We record. We don't decide.

The office decides and acts under its own escrow instructions and policies. Veto never approves, releases funds, or calls a file safe.

02

Never overclaim.

We report what's true — control configured, record present, limitation visible, exception recorded — and never “certified safe” or “fraud cleared.”

03

Controls before insurance.

Controls make risk observable; observable risk becomes underwritable. We earn the right to the second by doing the first.

04

Start where accountability already lives.

Escrow is built around conditional release, written instructions, funds, and a fiduciary who answers for the outcome. That's why we start here.

Who we are

Veto is a small team building the control layer for covered money instructions.

We start with escrow because it already lives where we want to operate: conditional release, written instructions, real funds, and a fiduciary who answers for the outcome. We work hand in hand with a handful of escrow and title offices to get the controls right before we widen the circle.

We hold a hard line on what we will and won't claim. The office decides and acts. Veto records the review. We would rather ship a narrow control that is true than a broad promise that isn't.

Team & backing · add when ready

Every fiduciary organization now needs a control layer between communication and action.

The mission
Request access

Be one of the first offices under control.

Veto is rolling out with a small group of escrow and title offices. Tell us the first instruction you want under control.
Prefer to look first? See a sample Review Record.