Financier leaves decade-long career to launch risk-assessment platform Sheriff

Vicente Cruz, a former private-debt and investment professional, has left a more than ten-year finance career to build Sheriff, a platform that aggregates public and private data to help companies and individuals assess risk in seconds.

Cruz’s decision to leave finance came after an underwater diving exercise in which an instructor asked him to jump backward off a boat with limited oxygen. He likened the sensation to launching a business: stepping into the unknown with scarce resources and no certainty about what lies ahead. “Starting a business is like jumping backward with limited oxygen,” he said. “In the worst case you return to the boat and life goes on. But if you never jump, you’ll never know what it’s like at the bottom of the sea.” Days after the dive, he resigned from his finance role.

Sheriff’s origin traces to a daily frustration Cruz faced while managing a private-debt portfolio. He routinely spent weeks gathering corporate records—financial, tax, legal and commercial—to decide whether a counterparty was reliable. He realized the same information existed but was hard to assemble quickly. “I used to spend a lot of time asking for documents from a counterparty,” he said. “I thought: this can be automated, not only for finance but for any company that needs to know who it is doing business with.”

The first version of Sheriff was a minimal product: send a national ID number and receive a Microsoft Word document listing court cases. Though simple, it validated demand for a faster way to evaluate risk. Today the platform pulls from more than 25 data sources and can return a risk profile in about five seconds, replacing processes that once took days. The company now serves more than 415 clients across 16 of Chile’s 21 main industries and continues to focus on reducing uncertainty before decisions are made.

Cruz credits a former boss with instilling a core principle he carries into Sheriff: verify everything. “Intuition helps, but data must confirm what you believe,” he said. “That applies to a customer, a supplier, a hire or a partner.” The company’s culture reflects that ethos, and Cruz emphasizes transparency with the team, arguing that if leadership changes direction without explanation, employees will keep rowing in the wrong direction.

Sheriff now operates in Chile and Peru, is preparing to enter Colombia, and is developing tools to assess companies outside Latin America. Its newest offering, Marshal, is an autonomous artificial-intelligence agent for compliance and due diligence that will launch soon and operate in more than 192 countries. Marshal scans international databases for sanctions, fraud, corruption, money laundering, organized crime and politically exposed persons, cutting what once took days into a much faster evaluation.

Growth has reshaped Cruz’s role from hands-on sales and support alongside a single developer to leading a 27-person team across functions. He describes managing people as the hardest part of becoming CEO. “Hire slowly and fire quickly,” he said. “You grow attached to people, but when someone isn’t working out, it affects the rest of the team.”

Reported by Startups Latam.