André Ferraz

CEO & Co-Founder Incognia

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

André Ferraz is the CEO and co-founder of Incognia, a mobile identity company whose approach to fraud prevention rests on an unusual premise: that where a device habitually is tells you more about whether its user is genuine than what that user claims about themselves. Incognia builds a persistent location behaviour signature for a device — the places it returns to, the patterns it follows — and uses the match or mismatch against that signature to verify identity and detect fraud, without requiring personally identifying information. The underlying location technology is the product of more than a decade of work by Ferraz and his co-founders, recognized by ACM, IEEE, and Microsoft Research for its precision, and previously commercialized through the ad tech company In Loco, acquired in 2020.

Career Highlights

• CEO and co-founder of Incognia, applying location behaviour to identity verification and fraud prevention.
• Co-developed location technology recognized by ACM, IEEE, and Microsoft Research for its precision.
• Co-founder of In Loco, an ad tech business built on the same technology, acquired in 2020.
• Founder of ubee, the research project that produced the original prototype.
• Started his first company while still a university student in Brazil.
• Member of the Forbes Technology Council and the Fast Company Executive Board.

Professional Journey

Ferraz studied computer science at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Brazil, and started his first company while still a student there. The work that would define his career began as a research project called ubee, which produced the first prototype of a location technology aimed at a hard problem: determining a mobile device’s position precisely and reliably indoors, where GPS degrades badly and where most of the commercially interesting activity actually happens.

That technology proved accurate enough to draw recognition from ACM, IEEE, and Microsoft Research, and Ferraz and his co-founders commercialized it first through In Loco, an advertising technology business that used precise location to target and measure campaigns. In Loco was acquired in 2020.

Incognia applies the same underlying capability to a different and more defensible market. In fraud prevention, the industry’s persistent difficulty is that the signals used to verify identity — documents, passwords, one-time codes, device fingerprints — are all things an attacker can obtain or forge. Location behaviour is harder to steal, because it is not a credential but a pattern: the set of places a device genuinely spends its time, built up over months. A login attempt from a device whose behavioural location signature matches its history is very likely legitimate; one that does not is worth challenging. Because the system reasons over behavioural patterns rather than identity documents, it can do this without collecting personally identifying data, which matters in a category increasingly constrained by privacy regulation.

Incognia sells that capability for account takeover prevention, new account fraud detection, and frictionless authentication, particularly in sectors like food delivery, ride hailing, marketplaces, and financial services, where fraud is high-volume and any added friction costs real conversion. Alongside running the company, Ferraz writes and speaks on fraud and identity through the Forbes Technology Council, the Fast Company Executive Board, and the company’s own publications, and he is an active member of Endeavor and other entrepreneurship organizations, mentoring founders.

Education

Stanford University Graduate School of Business

Executive education

Harvard Business School

Scaling Entrepreneurial Ventures

Latitud

Fellowship, Entrepreneurship / Entrepreneurial Studies

Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE)

Bachelor’s degree, Computer Science