2 Veteran Tech Execs Form TrackLight, Targeting Fraud in Government Payments

Founders in the News

May 28, 2024

Greg Loos and Linda Miller are the CEO and chief growth officer, respectively, of the company that brings AI to the fight against the rampant fraud and abuse of government payments that mushroomed during the pandemic.

Two technology executives in the gov tech cybersecurity sector have joined forces on a startup that’s officially launching this week.

Greg Loos, formerly with Pondera Solutions (now part of Thomson Reuters), and Linda Miller, who’s got a deep background in federal government, have launched TrackLight, which “gives you the tools to find and stop fraud actors before costly decisions are made to approve applications or payments,” according to the new company’s website. “Experience the power of a library of 3,000+ fraud schemes, 1 billion+ open-source intelligence, a specialized large language model, and generative AI, seamlessly integrated into the way you already work.”

CEO Loos, who’s based in El Dorado Hills, explained how the partnership came about with Miller, who’s the new company’s Washington, D.C.-based chief growth officer: “Linda and I had worked together in a previous life during the pandemic, working on addressing a fraud cleanup problem related to some of the unemployment insurance fraud that we all read about … and I got really motivated for what I call unfinished business with addressing government fraud.

“Really, the thing that most frustrated me was this concept that everybody was relegated to pay and chase and clean up fraud after the fact,” Loos told Industry Insider — California. “And then what we all saw during the pandemic, with the large amount of fraud that was committed, got me motivated to say, ‘How could we take this to the front door? How could we stop fraud and prevent it before it happens?’ And I was talking to a colleague of mine in the federal government, he said, ‘You need to call Linda Miller.’ And I said, I know Linda Miller. And so she was my first call.”

Miller has worked in both the public and private sectors, including having served as an assistant director and senior analyst with the U.S. Government Accountability Office and as deputy executive director of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), an entity established by the CARES Act in 2020 in part to detect “fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement of relief spending to hold wrongdoers accountable.”

Miller, who was an Olympic rower (U.S. Women’s Eight, 1997-2001, Sydney), has also been an adjunct professor at George Washington University.

In the private sector, she has served as director and principal with Grant Thornton LLP, as a partner in Guidehouse and as founder and CEO of Audient Group LLC.

Miller told Industry Insider how the partnership with Loos came about: “When he approached me about this idea, obviously I knew Greg from his time with Pondera, and that was a piece of technology that I admired. And I knew about all the work that Pondera and Greg and Jon (Pondera founder Jon Coss) had done at the state level. So when he showed me the sort of concept and the use of generative AI and large language models, I got really excited. What I really think this tool does, that nothing else that has come before it does, is really makes it sort of digestible and usable to government, staff and government employees.”

Loos said the TrackLight platform has four components: a due-diligence module; fraud analytics; social network analysis; and case management.

“We decided we wanted to build it all as one experience,” he said. “I will say the intersection of federal and state and local government is a really important part of this company. So we’re open for business, and we’re just going to continue to build out the team.”

Do you get any pushback of wanting to put a spotlight on the breadth of the problem?

The two said they’ve already bid on some government contracts in California — they can’t say which — and are aiming to work with state and local governments in large, tech-forward states including California, Texas and Florida.

“The legacy that I’m hoping for from TrackLight is that we could crack the code on preventing fraud at the front door,” Loos said. “We’ve now got the intersection of really advanced technology that’s fast enough to find fraud actors in seconds, and the subject matter expertise to responsibly use artificial intelligence and both train and test the outputs. … The legacy that we hope for is to really be the first one that can look you in the eye and say we were able to solve prepayment fraud, detection and prevention.”

“And what I’m hoping that we can accomplish with TrackLight is to finally debunk this myth that you can either get benefits and services to their intended recipients quickly, or you can prevent fraud, but you can’t do both. This is a false dichotomy. We can have a real opportunity at TrackLight to debunk that myth once and for all.”