From Circus Acrobat to CEO: Maika Isogawa's Unlikely Journey

Full transcript

Welcome back guys to another Agentee Digital podcast. Today we're joined by a special co-founder actually, uh Maika, who is the CEO and co-founder of Webacy, a crypto and digital asset security company. Maika, why don't you introduce yourself and tell a little bit about what you guys do. Yeah, happy to. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. My name is Maika Isogawa. And like you mentioned, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Webacy. And you had a pretty good intro. We do digital asset, risk intelligence, and due diligence for everything on chain. So what that means is that we can tell you the risk of any address, smart contract, transaction, and now stable coins and vaults as we get more into the mix between traditional finance and crypto. got it okay and Webacy has been around for four years before Webacy existed what was your day to day and what were you doing that made you actually start noticing this problem

Yeah, it's a great question. My background is a little odd. I'll tell you part of it just because I think it is matters to how I got into crypto in the first place. But I grew up between Japan and the United States. I'm half Japanese. And so I spent quite a bit of time between both countries. But when I was uh I was starting college at Stanford and I got a call to go work professionally as a circus acrobat. And so I worked for two and a half years traveling the world. And in 2014, I learned about Bitcoin for the first time. So this is actually quite long ago, but I started following blockchain technology and crypto. And I went back to study at school and I was actually doing a degree in AI. And this was before the whole AI hype boom. So a little bit early when it comes to the AI narrative. But I ended up starting to work in cybersecurity after this. So I had a Few internships here and there, ended up working full time at Microsoft in the cybersecurity group, as well as a few different FinTech companies along the way. So to answer your question, was, know, 2020 and 2021 was when crypto was starting to become very popular with consumer and retail. This was when NFTs started to become popular. And this was also the time when consumer security and safety was really poor. And so you saw a lot of scams and hacks. I got scammed with myself. and we saw that there was a really big need for better security tools and risk intelligence technology.

Okay got it. Nice yeah as you you mentioned NFTs I remember I got actually very late into that and yeah burned quite some money but yeah you learn and then you go forward. So how did you and the co-founder actually how did you guys meet? We met actually as friends. we met while I was working for Cirque du Soleil and he was working on his last company. And we stayed in touch for a very long time, both doing separate things. And then we both were passionate about solving the problem in the space. and I see a lot of people see the risk in crypto and they walk away from it and you actually run towards it. What do you know that makes you confident that this space is worth building in the long term? I think I'll be proven if this decision was good or not later on in a few years. I mean, still, I've been in this space for almost five years working on this company. So there's something here to be built. But as a founder, think that if a problem is worth solving, it's not going to be easy. Otherwise, it was going to be solved again. And there's a lot of value on working on hard problems. So number one, that keeps me going on the founder side of things. And the other side of things is that blockchain and tech has a really great opportunity to change the world of digital finance. uh the possibilities are still there when it comes to blockchain technology. And now we're seeing a lot more adoption and regulation of the technology, which is good for new technologies. means that rules are going to be in place. Companies are going to have to stick to more good practice. uh I think we saw a lot of bad practice in the past few years of crypto, which led to really big collapses like FTX, TerraLuna, and these are things that we want to avoid in the future. And regulation is not a bad thing. It actually just brings more clarity to the businesses that are building and we can protect consuming users better with more clear regulation. So I'm optimistic, but I do think this is the next wave of how we're going to move money in the world. And so it's something I want to keep building every day.

Maika could you take me to the early days like when you first went to talk to financial institutions about the digital asset security? What was that reception actually like? Were they ready to listen? I think it was a very different conversation from what you hear today. If you look in the news, every big bank and big company is doing something in digital assets, whether it's a stable coin or some sort of ETF. But five years ago, that was not the case at all. uh In many cases, they wouldn't even speak to a company working in crypto. And I think crypto is earning its legitimacy. But in our early days, we were working actually really towards those consumers that were risk on working in crypto, trying to trade, trying to make money. So it was very different conversations than we're having five years down the road. With a small team, how did you guys figure out what to actually build first as I can't imagine that there were hundreds of things you could have tackled?

Yeah, it's a tough one. think it's really fun to build. I would say it's fun to be a founder. It's fun to build things, but at some point in your life cycle as a company, you need to actually build a company that adds value and that lasts. So those are two different modes of company. When we first started, we built something that we really wanted to exist and something that we thought was valuable. That was actually a failure. So we, the first product we actually built was a crypto will. So how do you pass on? crypto assets when you die. So we thought this was really important and we thought that just like in traditional inheritance, you would need a way to pass on your crypto inheritance. And at the time, this was again, 2021, this was not the right time for a product like this in the market. And that was mostly because the people who own crypto were super risk on, they were tended to skew younger and they mostly do not have physical wills or at traditional wills anyway. So when it comes to a court of law, if you don't have a traditional will, it's much harder to actually look at a digital will and say that has validity. So we completely missed that mark. I think today it's some products still have an inheritance piece and it's a really interesting problem, but we started there and we made a lot of mistakes. So we learned and as a founder, I've grown a lot to learn to build products that customers are talking about a need, right? Like solving a problem, solving a need. And luckily there's a lot of problems and needs within crypto. And so there's no limit of things that you can build.

Got it. Okay. And what was something that really was very surprising at first that you didn't think would happen when you actually start building? You know, I thought people in crypto and traders would care lot more about risk than they actually did. And this is coming from like years and years of experience in the space. It's really amazing. I think a lot of people get into crypto actually because they know that risk, high risk comes with a potential of high reward. And this is why we're seeing prediction markets. And this is why we're seeing gambling technologies succeed on crypto is because people want high risk, reward. And they're not actually afraid to lose money in some cases. uh We see obviously a lot of different hacks and incidents that happen where people lose a lot of money and we are really, that's a really unfortunate situation in this space. But I was surprised to find how many users did not care too much about risk as long as there is the hope that they could make a lot of money if they were to bet on the right thing.

I can imagine that actually enterprise sales to financial institutions are notoriously slow, right? Has there been like a moment where you genuinely questioned whether the timing was right for what you are actually building? Yeah, this is a great question. And you're so right. Enterprise sales, the sales cycle is really meticulously long. And these corporates often have really large teams that are difficult to navigate. And then these companies, it's different from when you're selling to customers or when you're selling to startups versus when you start to sell to larger businesses, because uh the person that you're working with within the company, your advocate, they have a lot of people looking at them. And if they bring a bad company into a deal, they are the ones who take the fault. So they have to think about their own risk. They need to make themselves look good. And so you are battling a much different fight when you are selling to institutions versus consumers. Today, you still have to deal with that. think companies need to understand the sales cycle for this institutional sales can be really, really long, like six months, a year sometimes. And the due diligence process of KYB to become a vendor is also really strict. So have to make sure your paperwork's in order, you need to have a lot of security in place. We're going through our SOC 2 right now. There's a lot of maturity signals that you need to have as a company. And so we are very quickly growing to meet these standards, but it's a very different battle than uh beta C sales.

If Webacy actually looks the way you want it to look uh three years from now, what's the thing that had to go right to get there? Ooh, it's a good question. I think we need to win some of these larger deals for sure. We need to convince a few bigger players in the space that having risk intelligence visible and transparent is very positive for the ecosystem. And I think we're seeing a lot of companies wake up to that. As more regulation comes, as we see, unfortunately, quite a few hacks and vulnerabilities happened in 2026 already, early this year. It's only going to continue. The importance of risk intelligence proper due diligence and safety is going to only increase. So all things are pointing in our favor, but now we just need to execute as a team. If you could pass down some kind of advice to financial institutions, what would it be?

Great question. I think financial institutions are really used to, and it makes sense why, they're used to systems that protect them from mistakes. So if you make a transaction, you have a way to revert it or you can pause it. There's a lot of safety mechanisms in place that can help you fix a oopsie if you make one. In crypto and on blockchain rails, there's a lot less safety measures and ability to revert any kind of transaction. So they actually need to move their systems of risk analysis into that new environment. And they're, not quite set up with, do so with the old systems that they have. So things like real time monitoring, pre-transaction screening, building guardrails that are really stringent. These are things that will help them feel more comfortable entering the space and also hopefully avoid a lot of issues down the road. You've been in business for four years. You already mentioned that. With all of that experience that you've gathered over the years, if you were to start Webacy tomorrow, would something change in terms of how you would build it?

Ooh, I think the last four or five years we've seen this entire AI boom explode, right? So we started before AI grew into such a powerful tool and then that flip switched. So if I were to restart the company today, it'd be very different. And I think we could get to where we are faster and hopefully with better thoughts and insights into what we are building and for whom. uh the thesis would stay the same, right? We still want to protect digital assets on chain, but I think that there's a lot of things now that came out in the past year and a half that would have accelerated how we could have gotten here. Okay, great. Maika, thanks for joining the podcast. Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you where can people find you? Where can they uh find what you guys are building? Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been fun. You can find Webacy at webacy.com and dd.xyz. Okay, well, thanks for joining and we'll see you in the next one. Thank you.