The Team

Friedrich Lindenberg is the founder of OpenSanctions. His interest in watchlist data is inspired by his work in investigative reporting. Friedrich led the data team at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) from 2016 to 2021, where he contributed to numerous investigations into transnational crime, offshore finance and money laundering; including the Russian and Azerbaijani Laundromat cases.

He started the Aleph project, an open-source data platform used by reporters and analysts in over 40 media organisations to explore large structured and unstructured datasets and find reporting leads.

Frederik Richter worked as a financial and investigative journalist for 20 years, during which he uncovered numerous cases of fraud, money laundering and bribery. His main interest has always been the space where power and money overlap.

Frederik reported from the Middle East and South East Asia for over ten years, including for Reuters. In 2015, he joined the Berlin-based investigative newsroom CORRECTIV where he led a number of award-winning investigations, including on the global CumEx tax fraud. In 2020, he published a book on the foreign corrupt practices still widespread in the export business of German industry, with chapters including on Brazil, South Africa, Russia and the Arab world.

Brenna Maeve is the head of Customer Success and Community Management at OpenSanctions. She is focused on developing the framework for a robust customer journey that not only gives a smooth experience, but also meaningful engagement and adoption.

Her first introduction to Open Data was while working for Mapillary, now a part of Meta, where she engaged with the OpenStreetMap community that included humanitarian mapping projects and organizations across the globe. She is passionate about having good, accessible, clear data contribute to tangible change.

Shauna Blackmon is a communications specialist, passionate about using innovative tech for social good. Her background is in journalism and communications, and in recent years, she has changed her focus to helping NGO and tech start-ups tell their stories.

She hopes to help steer the conversation on how technologies can be carefully and safely implemented to advance all of humanity, rather than help a selected few.

Shauna is based in Barcelona and trains as an acrobat in her free time.

JD Bothma is a software developer with a deep interest in making data meaningful, and making systems work. At OpenSanctions he works on the data platform and supports customers in making use of the data. Previously as Head of Tech and then Head of Product at OpenUp in South Africa, JD was responsible for developing numerous open data tools, making information easily accessible to both technical and non-technical audiences and clients in government, civil society, academia, and the media.

He has a passion for understanding how data is best shared to be easily usable, and helping users understand the opportunities and limitations of a dataset.

Simon Thordal has been working as a software engineer for the past 10 years with a particular focus on linked data, networks and graph databases. Through his work at Ulobby he has been involved in the development of a platform for media and policy text monitoring with a large portion of his time spent working on tools for entity deduplication and resolution.

At OpenSanctions his focus is on improving and monitoring the quality of our sanctions matching leading to more reliable sanctions results that can be acted on confidently.