Emily founded Aruspex in 2023 after realizing that zero-knowledge cryptography, originally developed for blockchain systems, could solve a critical national security problem: verifying AI without exposing it.

She spent almost 20 years in institutional finance and enterprise operations — after earning a B.S. in Business Administration from UC Riverside — before becoming interested in blockchain technology, which led her to cryptographic systems and, in turn, to zero-knowledge proofs. She taught herself the underlying cryptography and built Aruspex's zero-knowledge proof-of-concept, using agentic AI-assisted development, to validate that the architecture works. When she saw what happened when you combined AI with advanced cryptography, it clicked: this was the solution to verifying AI in high-stakes environments where exposure isn't an option.

The US is in an AI arms race, and the bottleneck isn't just building better AI — it is proving AI works without revealing how it works. That's where zero-knowledge machine learning becomes mission-critical, even if the intersection of AI and cryptography is still relatively unexplored territory.

She decided life's too short not to swing for the fences. Finance to defense tech. Done.

The defense tech landscape has changed. A new generation of software-first companies proved that startups can solve national security problems at scale. Emily is building in that new tradition. Cryptographic AI verification for defense, space, quantum computing, and whatever comes next.