Max Goldman has spent his career building tech companies—but his latest venture hits closer to home. In an exclusive interview with The Financial Technology Report, the Carefull Co-Founder and Co-CEO shared how he’s tackling one of the fastest-growing financial threats: scams and fraud targeting older adults. “Careful really exists to sort of help better protect regular folks and especially older folks from the fraud and scams that are now coming at them basically every day,” he explained in the conversation.
The idea for Carefull took shape in late 2019, when Goldman teamed up with longtime friend and now co-CEO Todd Rovak. Rovak’s background working with large financial institutions, combined with Goldman’s tech experience—including a successful exit to Google—sparked the opportunity. “It became very personal… How can I help solve this problem, not just for Americans, but for me personally,” Goldman shared with The Financial Technology Report, recalling a family member’s health decline that underscored the need for better protections.
Since launching, Carefull has been building momentum with banks, credit unions, and wealth advisors nationwide. The company’s B2B2C model helps institutions extend trust to their customers while providing what Goldman calls “an all-in-one financial safety platform.”
At the center of that platform is a system designed to spot trouble early—before minor issues snowball into major losses. “It sort of creates a model of what good or normal looks like for a particular person or household and then monitors for all different kinds of anomalies,” Goldman explained. That includes everything from scams and check washing to early signs of cognitive decline. “We can identify using our data if someone is sort of on the path to dementia… up to like six years before you can understand it in the doctor's office.”
For Goldman, success depends as much on how the technology reaches people as it does on the technology itself. “How do you get a customer to care? How do you get a customer to pay attention? How do you get a customer to understand the content and the substance of what you're sharing?” It’s a question he’s focused on throughout his career, learning from mentors like Rob Bernshteyn, former CEO of Coupa, who showed him you can “build a company from a place of care… and do something great.”
That mindset carries through to Carefull’s latest step—a partnership with the Alzheimer’s Association. “We have joined forces with them to help educate folks about it, to improve our product around some of the understanding that they have developed and that we have developed over time,” Goldman said in the interview.
At the end of the day, Goldman’s goal is simple: outsmart the scammers before they outsmart the people most at risk. “The scammers are sophisticated,” he said. “How do we fight fire with fire? How do we help protect the folks who really need it?”
