#1 - Most Fundable: Nebula Fog AI Hackathon: Revolutionizing Fraud Detection
Picture this: you’re knee-deep in a fraud investigation.
Millions of documents are stacked against you—emails, PDFs, scanned contracts, ownership charts. It feels less like detective work and more like drowning in a filing cabinet avalanche.
That’s the chaos investigators, analysts, and lawyers face every day. And until now, the process was painfully manual—expensive, slow, and riddled with “copy-paste fatigue.”
1st Place Prize - Most Fundable Category
Enter Nebula Investigations: an AI-powered tool that makes sense of the mess. Born at Nebula Fog: Prime, a hackathon founded by Rob Ragan, this project shows what happens when smart people and smart tech collide in all the right ways.
👉 Watch demos and updates on Nebula Fog’s YouTube channel
👉 Learn more about Nebula Fog here: nebulafog.ai
From Paper Stacks to Smart Graphs
The demo (presented by Kristin Del Rosso, Aashiq Ramachandran, and Jonathan De Armas) starts with a simple but maddening reality: fraudsters love shell companies. They bury assets under layers of trusts and holding companies, forcing investigators to dig through endless, repetitive documents just to map out ownership structures.
Normally, analysts pay per document reviewed (about a dollar a pop). Multiply that by millions, and your budget disappears faster than a Cayman Islands wire transfer.
Nebula flips the script. Instead of manual reviews, it:
-
Turns PDFs into images – every page, every chart.
-
Uses a vision model (GPT-4o in this case) to detect ownership hierarchies hidden in those charts.
-
Explains what it sees in plain English before auto-generating database queries.
-
Loads those queries into Neo4j, creating a living, searchable web of relationships.
The result? A crisp, interactive graph that shows who owns what, how much, and through which shell company. No more redrawing charts in Multigo for the billionth time.
Why It’s a Game-Changer
🔍 Clarity at Scale: Millions of pages become a structured, searchable graph.
⚖️ Lossless Analysis: Every detail, from ownership percentages to metadata, gets captured—not just names on a chart.
🚀 Pivot-Friendly: Found a new name? Click it, trace it, and pivot your investigation instantly.
🧠 Built for the Future: Today it’s Neo4j queries; tomorrow it’s natural language search. Imagine just typing: “Who owns ShellCo Ltd.?” and getting an instant, accurate answer.
Do Cool Things the Right Way!®
This isn’t just about speeding up investigations—it’s about doing better work with fewer blind spots. By automating the grunt work, Nebula frees up investigators to focus on strategy, context, and the human side of fraud cases.
At Island Pitch, we love this because it’s a perfect example of our mantra: Do Cool Things the Right Way!®.
-
Cool thing? Turning AI loose on fraud’s paper trail.
-
Right way? Keeping data accurate, transparent, and accessible—no cutting corners, no smoke and mirrors.
The Bigger Picture
Fraud investigations may seem niche, but the blueprint here applies everywhere:
-
Legal discovery: untangling who’s connected to who.
-
Compliance audits: spotting hidden risks in corporate structures.
-
Media & entertainment: (yes, our world!) mapping licensing chains with the same graph-based approach.
Wherever there’s complexity, AI can help untangle it.
Final Word
Imagine building something powerful like Nebula Investigations, not to replace analysts... But to supercharge them—cutting hours of slog into seconds of insight... now imagine your own challenges solved with our Lighthouse Demo innovation sprints.
And that’s the future we’re here for: AI as a partner, not a paper-pusher.
👉 Want to explore how AI and automation could simplify your messy workflows? Book a 3-Hour Tour with us, and let’s sketch out your roadmap.
Because whether you’re chasing shell companies or just tired of chasing spreadsheets, the goal’s the same: clarity, speed, and smarter systems.
Let’s Do Cool Things the Right Way!® —together. 🌐✨
