Yagub Rahimov, Founder and CEO of Polygraf AI, joins Robin Ayoub to unpack a career that spans trading fortunes won and lost, a fintech media exit, and now a mission to make AI trustworthy. Polygraf builds small, local, explainable AI that protects organizations from data leakage, deepfakes, and shadow AI risk, recently winning Best in Show at SXSW and closing a 9.5 million dollar seed round.
Yagub Rahimov left Azerbaijan as a teenager on a US cultural exchange program and became an award-winning trader before finishing school, turning 25,000 dollars into 1.9 million before losing most of it to greed. He rebuilt, co-founded a global fintech media group, and exited to private equity in 2020. Today he leads Polygraf AI, an Austin-based company pioneering small language models that run on-premise and on the edge, addressing data leakage, deepfakes, and shadow AI for highly regulated environments.
In this episode, Robin and Yagub talk about the bicycle story that shaped his sense of responsibility, the discipline lessons learned from a major trading collapse, why small local AI models can outperform giant cloud models on sensitive tasks, how Polygraf catches deepfakes and AI-assisted interview cheating, the security risks hiding inside bring-your-own-LLM setups, and his vision for AI running privately on every device, from phones to defense systems.
Connect with Yagub Rahimov: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yrahimov/ | https://polygraf.ai
Connect with Robin Ayoub: https://www.linkedin.com/company/localization-fireside-chat | https://robinayoub.blog | https://n49networks.com
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nxCZTk1Ld7U
Book a podcast conversation: L10NFiresidechat@gmail.com