Compliance technology founder, inventor, and builder of data and search platforms for risk, diligence, and identity intelligence.
Al Macdonald entered the compliance field in 1997, when the infrastructure for sanctions screening and entity resolution was still being defined. The work then was largely manual — matching names against lists, resolving ambiguous identities, building confidence in data that was inherently messy. He spent nearly a decade developing the domain knowledge and technical intuition that would shape everything that followed.
In 2006, he founded Nominodata to build data and search platforms for sanctions screening, entity resolution, and risk intelligence. The core challenge was scale and ambiguity: compliance systems need to find the right entity across millions of records, across transliterated names, across incomplete data. Nominodata built the infrastructure to do that reliably.
In 2026, he founded Hunter Data to continue that work with a new generation of tools — applying advances in search, data infrastructure, and AI to the same hard problems in compliance and identity intelligence.
Across nearly three decades in the field, Al has been granted 23 US patents covering compliance screening, entity resolution, matching and search, risk data systems, and monitoring workflows. The patents reflect the technical depth of the problems — each one addresses a specific, non-obvious challenge in building reliable compliance infrastructure.