Ahead of the TechStars Sydney ‘Demo the Future’ on December 8, Startup Daily is profiling the 12 startups and their founders in the 2025 cohort.
Our next profile is Crystal aOS – setting up the future for crypto compliance.
Crystal aOS
Founder: Joni Pirovich
One-liner: Crystal aOS is the governance, risk and compliance management system for crypto companies.
What’s the future of crypto compliance?
Go onto the Adidas website and buy your sibling a gift card for Christmas. If you want, you can make that purchase in bitcoin.
It feels like a gimmick, but as Joni, the founder of Crystal aOS, explains: “We are so early in crypto, but it’s already a $4 trillion asset class.”
“This is real money, and real technology, she says.
“In a few years time, you won’t laugh at buying a pizza with a stablecoin or having the deed to your home on the blockchain, you’ll expect it. In fact, you’ll have agents transacting, investing, and communicating for you while you sleep.”
Joni explains that the infrastructure which makes all of this possible is “exploding” with stablecoins, exchanges and tokenisation leading the way.
“The compliance regulations that protect us are catching up,” she also says.
“Crypto-specific firms will soon need to meet close to the same compliance standards (and sometimes more) as a traditional bank.”
Why did Techstars invest?
Christie Jenkins, Managing Director of Techstars Sydney, is excited to have Crystal aOS in the 2025 cohort.
“Techstars is a global accelerator, the Sydney program is one of 27 globally and it’s a generalist one. We invest in everything from biotech to consumer to AI. But Techstars has previously run a Web3 specific program in the UK,” Jenkins said.
“When I called Pete who is the Managing Director of that program his first words were: ‘Joni is the real deal. If you invest in her, I’ll personally mentor her.’ He also happens to be on the board of Coinbase so it’s hard to ignore that kind of endorsement.”
Jenkins also loves that Joni is already on her way.
“She also happens to have the absolute best problem for a startup founder to have – too much demand. She’s got over 50 enterprise clients lined up wanting to use her product and she can’t onboard them quickly enough.”
What’s the problem solved?
“Imagine that you lead a product team in a crypto company. Your job is to launch new tokens and other products,” Joni said.
“And the promise of crypto is that it is global, and so you have to launch in every market.”
It’s a space Joni knows well, as she previously founded the number one crypto-specific law firm in APAC.
“The problem is, there are already 195 different jurisdictions for crypto regulations. To launch a product compliantly in just one of them will cost $200k in legal fees, 400 hours of work from your internal team, and take eight months or longer. It’s a mess,” she said.
So she created the answer.
Explain how the product works
“We built the only database in the world that contains the full range of crypto-specific laws as well as ‘soft laws’ like web guidance and speeches that is the critical context that the best crypto lawyers know to keep up with. And we update it daily,” she said.
It turns out the ‘aOS’ in the company name stands for agentic Operating System.
Joni isn’t building just one product, she’s building an entire platform with:
- AI-based chat to search the knowledge base.
- Agentic workflows to automate compliance processes.
- API integrations for companies to use Crystal aOS in their own systems.
- A network of human pros for when it’s too tricky for AI.
“Firms can build special purpose AI agents and deconstruct processes into a series of tasks that can be completed by humans, AI agents or automations,” Joni said.
“We hero the human-in-the-loop unlike most general agentic workflow builders, and optimise human effort.”
What’s the long term ambition?
For Joni the future is: “our product does governance, risk and compliance for crypto firms”.
“Next, we will support financial services firms with their traditional compliance and crypto compliance which will need to co-exists,” she said.
And eventually?
“Ultimately, if the market does move to the tokenisation of everything – even things like medical and social media data – then Crystal aOS is designed to be the compliance infrastructure layer for the future digital economy.”
What’s the most important lesson Techstars Sydney taught you?
“Be opportunistic, but disciplined,”Joni responded adding that this is the advice her mentor, Pete, gave her and stayed with her:
“These words are my threshold test for triaging and retriaging what to spend time on each day,” she said.
- See Crystal aOS and the Techstars startups in action at Demo the Future, Monday December 8, 5-8pm. Details here.
- Read about our other Techstars Sydney startups here.
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