Founded Date

Nov 2025

Legal Status

Delaware C. Corp

Team Size

3

Key Roles

Solo founder/CEO + Founding Engineers

Founder Names

Bernadette Inah Mairren Pantaleon

Prior Founder Experience

Execution Track Record. Before Knight, she founded, scaled, and exited four ventures (consulting, media, performance marketing, real estate) — bootstrapping each to $30K+/month within six months, managing $1M+ in ad spend for global brands, and driving $38M+ in real estate sales across Bali and Singapore. These served as rapid testing grounds for the scalable systems now redeployed into financial infrastructure.

Global Operator. Lives and operates across Manila ⇄ Bali ⇄ Singapore ⇄ Tokyo, building founder-led financial infrastructure from lived pain points.

Team Location

Singapore/ Manila

SEA Connection

I'm based primarily in Singapore. I know the city and its fintech ecosystem like the back of my hand — and I'm building Knight as someone genuinely embedded across Southeast Asia.

Singapore (base): I'm an Inaugural Member of the GFTN Next Gen Leaders Programme — an initiative under the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) — and a member of the Singapore FinTech Association and the Singapore Global Network, putting me directly inside the region's core fintech and regulatory circles. I'm also a member of Mandala Club, which keeps me close to the founder/operator/investor community here.

Philippines (home market): I'm Filipino-born and a Philippine passport holder. Knight is in active partnership with the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) — currently in talks for a potential USD 100K startup grant. DOST reached out to me, inviting me to be a face of Philippine fintech and offering to introduce Knight to the country's megabanks.

Bali (community + ICP roots): I'm Chairman of a 450+ member founder community in Bali (largely expat founders and operators). Before Knight, I built Bali's largest real estate agency — which is now a direct ICP for Knight's tokenization use case, giving me real, operating ground-truth on cross-border asset and property flows.

Across Singapore, Manila, and Bali, I'm building Knight from lived experience inside Southeast Asia's fragmented financial systems, so trust and money can move safely across the region's borders.

Referral Source

Twitter

Product Description

Knight is a financial technology company that helps banks and financial institutions verify trust and move money safely across borders. When a person or business wants to send money internationally or open a financial account, institutions are legally required to confirm who they are and that the transaction is legitimate — today a slow, manual, and inconsistent process from country to country.

Knight provides software that automates these identity, compliance, and verification checks and connects them across different countries and systems, so cross-border financial activity is faster, fully compliant, and properly documented. Knight is a registered US Delaware company and works with established financial-technology partners to deliver this service.

Knight operates as a B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) company and also works directly with governments (B2G, business-to-government). It is currently working toward integrating with a G7 country's government blockchain, and is in early-stage engagement with a Southeast Asian government body under its Department of Science and Technology.

Product Stage

MVP

Product URL

https://youtu.be/hSCQCg235hg

Active Users Count

0 — pre-launch; MVP shipping ~July 3rd week, partnership agreement signed with Sumsub, finalizing with Plaid, design partners in pipeline (Curvegrid, Mizuhiki, Sera Protocol)

Tech Stack

Backend: Node.js / TypeScript API. Smart contracts & attestations: Solidity, Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) on Base + Ethereum. On-chain verification via merkle proofs with selective disclosure. Off-chain encrypted storage for full attestation payloads. KYC/identity via Sumsub; financial-data connectivity via Plaid (NA), Brankas (SEA), MoneyTree (Japan); on-chain identity via Self Protocol. Frontend: Next.js. Postgres for indexing/metadata.

Onchain Rationale

Knight issues portable trust attestations — verified claims about a user's identity and financial behavior — that must be (1) tamper-proof, (2) independently verifiable by any institution without trusting Knight as a middleman, and (3) portable across borders, institutions, and product lines.

We anchor these attestations on-chain using the Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS), natively on Base. Base is our home chain — chosen for its low transaction costs (critical when issuing and verifying attestations at scale for cross-border finance), its Coinbase-backed institutional credibility (which matters when our customers are banks and regulated financial institutions), and its EVM compatibility with the broader Ethereum/EAS ecosystem.

The on-chain layer stores only a cryptographic merkle root and attestation metadata — never personal data. When a partner institution needs to verify a user, Knight returns a selective disclosure (e.g. identityVerified: true, balanceTier: "mid") plus merkle proofs, which the partner verifies independently against the on-chain root via the EAS registry on Base — confirming the attestation is real and untampered without contacting Knight and without seeing the underlying raw data.

What would be lost off-chain: in a centralized database, every verification would require trusting and querying Knight directly — recreating the single-point-of-trust, walled-garden problem we exist to solve. Institutions couldn't independently verify claims, attestations wouldn't be portable across jurisdictions or counterparties, and there'd be no tamper-evidence. Anchoring on Base is what makes trust portable, independently verifiable, and durable across borders — so a verification done once in one market can be trusted everywhere else. Selective disclosure + merkle proofs deliver this while keeping all personal data off-chain and privacy-preserving.

Traction Description

In 3 months, Knight went from a pre-pivot concept to a building company with signed partners, institutional interest, and a clear path to a live MVP. We pivoted from neobank to AI trust infrastructure, signed our first KYC partner (Sumsub), entered KYB diligence with Plaid, locked an engineering partner (Curvegrid), and earned inbound interest from a16z, alongside government and regulator relationships across Japan, Singapore, and the Philippines.