Chainalysis

Chainalysis is a blockchain analysis company founded in 2014 and headquartered in New York City, widely regarded as the first startup dedicated to tracing cryptocurrency transactions. Founded by Michael Gronager, Jan Moller, and Jonathan Levin — with Levin now serving as chief executive — the company built its reputation by turning the public but pseudonymous data on blockchains into usable intelligence: tracing the flow of funds across chains and attributing on-chain addresses to real-world entities such as exchanges, illicit services, and sanctioned wallets.

Its products anchor two markets. For investigators and compliance teams, Reactor is the flagship tool for tracing funds and building court-usable evidence, while KYT (Know Your Transaction) provides real-time transaction monitoring and risk scoring for exchanges and institutions; a free, publicly hosted Sanctions API screens addresses against sanctions lists. Its customer base spans government and law-enforcement agencies — including the FBI, DEA, and IRS Criminal Investigation — alongside roughly 1,500 organizations worldwide.

Chainalysis has moved deliberately into machine learning through acquisition and new products. It acquired Hexagate (on-chain threat prevention) in December 2024 and Alterya (real-time, AI-driven fraud and scam detection) in January 2025, and in March 2026 launched Blockchain Intelligence Agents — agentic assistants that accept natural-language queries and run automated multi-chain analysis under human control. The company is candid, and its critics insistent, that the core of address attribution remains heuristics, graph analysis, and human-curated intelligence rather than deep learning — a distinction tested publicly in the 2024 Sterlingov trial, where the defense challenged its methods as a black box even as the court admitted them. Chainalysis is privately held; its landmark 2022 Series F, led by the Singapore sovereign fund GIC, remains its last major disclosed financing.