A free market solution to government fraud?
The founders behind the Antifraud Company — a startup that’s framing itself as a private sector version of DOGE — have raised $5.1 million from backers such as Abstract Ventures, Browder Capital and Dune Ventures.
The idea — find government fraud and get a cut of the proceeds — came together earlier this year when co-founder Alex Shieh, 20, was recruited by and briefly considered joining DOGE. But as he mulled over the opportunity, he began to think about how he could achieve something similar on his own.
“The private sector can be more efficient in going through the data and finding the fraud … and then doing all the stuff that the government may not have the resources or the incentive to do,” he told me.
While DOGE is set to end in 2026, after 18 months of looking to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, the Antifraud Company is hoping to make their own company a long-term effort.
“There’s more staying power … and ultimately changing the government from within is just inherently difficult,” co-founder Sahaj Sharda, 27, told me. “Private sector incentives just work much better.”
Even Elon Musk, one of the richest and most successful men to ever live — with the full backing of MAGA and access to any and all records — eventually grew weary of trying to cut through the waste.
Of course, DOGE did in fact cut nearly $60 billion — according to the DOGE website. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it was nowhere near the $2 trillion they’d intended to trim.
This isn’t the first time the Antifraud Company founders have exposed waste.
Co-founder and President Alex Shieh made headlines earlier this year when, as a sophomore at Brown University, he emailed every single person on the college’s payroll to ask what they do all day.
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Only 20 responded, several with ad hominem attacks — furious at him for trying to get more insight into how the school, which costs upwards of $90,000 a year, spends its money.
While the initial backlash was swift and fierce — he faced disciplinary action by the school — Brown has recently trimmed a number of positions to reduce expenses. In late September, the university announced it would be laying off 48 employees and eliminating 55 unfilled positions that were previously budgeted for.
The Antifraud Company co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Sahaj Sharda graduated from Georgetown undergrad and Columbia Law School and spent years researching and writing a book, “The College Cartel,” that showed how Ivy League schools fix prices — and increase cost for students. It resulted in multiple billion-dollar class action lawsuits.
Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer David Barclay, 39, came from the Federal Trade Commission where he tells us he stopped big pharmaceutical companies from defrauding Medicaid and Medicare.
The co-founders tell me the company combines many different techniques to go after waste, fraud, and abuse. They rely on artificial intelligence to find discrepancies and investigative research to follow up on leads.
They get a portion of the money they recover through the government whistleblower programs, which provide financial rewards, typically a percentage of recovered funds, to individuals who report fraud. The incentives typically range from 10% to 30% of the sum the government recovers, but it can take years to get paid.
The founders say they’ve already uncovered as much as $250 million in fraud since launching in June. They see their work as not only uncovering waste and abuse but also reinstalling faith in government and recovering money for Americans.
“There’s an affordability crisis as people can afford less and less,” Sharda told me. “Meanwhile as much as $500 billion is being spent in improper expenditures every year, according to the Government Accountability Office… that’s like $1,500 per American citizen.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
