Founder spotlight: Coris AI's founder on growing 5x without scaling headcount

Vinodh Poyyapakkam doesn't believe in throwing bodies at problems.

While most startups scale headcount alongside revenue, the Coris AI co-founder and CEO took the opposite approach: His team stayed at less than 10 people while growing revenue 5x in 10 months. The result? A lean operation that evaluates millions of merchants and transactions monthly—and consistently gets praised by customers for moving faster than competitors with teams five times the size.

Coris builds risk infrastructure for companies onboarding businesses globally, with a focus on payment processors like Stripe and Adyen. The platform ingests unstructured data—everything from company websites to transactional data—and helps risk teams make faster, more accurate decisions about fraud, creditworthiness, and compliance. 

Vinodh's background spans over 15 years in risk and payments. He met his co-founder at a previous Y Combinator company, where they both experienced firsthand how hard it was to scale risk operations, especially when dealing with unstructured data about businesses. 

During COVID, the problem became impossible to ignore. Traditional automation couldn't handle the nuance and human review teams couldn't scale. Then generative AI arrived, and suddenly, the problem they'd struggled with for years became solvable.

It's the kind of sophisticated decision making that used to require armies of analysts. Now it happens automatically, with Fortune 10 companies among Coris' growing customer base.

But Coris' real competitive edge isn't just the technology. It's how Vinodh built the company to win.

How Coris is disrupting risk infrastructure

When payment processors onboard new merchants, they face a tricky balancing act: Move too slowly, and you lose deals. Move too fast, and you expose yourself to fraud or compliance violations.

Most companies handle this with a mix of basic automation for simple cases and human review teams for everything else. That works fine at a small scale. But as you grow into new markets or take on more complex merchant types, the long tail of edge cases explodes. You're drowning in unstructured data like PDFs, websites, social media profiles, bank statements, leaving you with subjective judgment calls that don't fit neatly into rules-based systems.

That's where Coris comes in. 

The platform doesn't just automate the easy stuff. It tackles the messy, unstructured data that traditionally required human review, surfacing the right context and integrating directly with tools like Salesforce, Stripe, and Adyen to close the loop on decisions. 

For risk teams, it means faster onboarding without sacrificing accuracy. For Coris, it means solving a problem that gets more valuable as AI gets better at handling nuance.

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Why Coris' build-to-win mentality drives results

Vinodh is blunt about what matters: "We can't just be playing for the sake of playing. It's important to play to win."

That philosophy shows up everywhere at Coris, from how they hire to how they work with customers. Here's how they put it into practice:

Tip 1: Meet customers where they are (even if it goes against logic)

Last year, a Fortune 10 company reached out wanting to work with Coris. This was great news, except they didn't want to integrate via API. They wanted to send files back and forth in an automated batch process.

For most startups, that's a dealbreaker. File transfers feel like a relic from 20 years ago. Why would you accommodate that when you've built a modern API-first product?

Because winning matters more than being right.

Coris built the file transfer capability in weeks. The Fortune 10 company got to see value without taking on integration risk upfront. Once they saw ROI, they believed. That flexibility — being willing to step outside the usual boundaries — turned a "maybe later" into a major customer relationship.

The lesson? Don't let your ideal customer workflow get in the way of an actual customer. If you're confident in your product's value, meet people where they are and prove it.

Tip 2: Hire for slope, not resume

Coris has stayed at less than 10 people while growing revenue by 5x. That's not an accident.

Vinodh looks for slope over experience. "It doesn't matter where they are today, but really how fast they've come," he says.

Someone with two years of experience who's grown rapidly and can grasp new problems quickly beats someone with 10 years at a big tech company who needs infrastructure and specs to move.

He's also explicit about startup experience. Engineers who thrive at big tech companies often struggle at early-stage startups. There's no beautiful product spec, and there's no polished infrastructure. You're working directly with customers, iterating fast, and building without guardrails.

Coris uses work trials to validate fit on both sides. It's not just about testing candidates, after all, it's about managing risk. If someone's betting their career on joining an early-stage company, they need to know it's the right team. 

Staying lean also keeps the team nimble. With less than 10 people, there's no bureaucracy, no layers of approval, and no coordination overhead. Just fast, decisive execution that customers notice.

What's next for Coris

Coris is hiring across engineering, product, and growth, specifically looking for people at the intersection of AI and finance. They're tackling frontier problems like evaluating small language models and building complex agentic workflows.

But they're not planning to scale headcount aggressively. 

For Coris, the playbook is simple: Build to win. Stay lean. Move fast. And when a Fortune 10 company asks to send files, take them.