Welcome to our latest episode of Women in Crypto, presented by the Association for Women in Cryptocurrency and sponsored by Bracewell LLP. In this episode, we dive into “A-Finance, Autonomous Financial Guardrails, and AI Safety” with Timothy Darrah and Caroline Randall Williams, co-founders of Mangrove. Tim is an Army veteran, former NASA fellow, CEO, and Vanderbilt professor with over a decade of experience building AI for high-stakes environments. Caroline is a co-founder, poet, and Vanderbilt writing professor who uses storytelling to make complex technical concepts accessible. We explore Tim and Caroline’s founder journey and how combining technical rigor with narrative shaped Mangrove—a platform named after trees that connect disparate ecosystems across traditional finance, digital assets, and AI. We examine the three phases of AI adoption, structural limits of LLMs in financial decision-making, and technical risks like hallucination, confabulation, and poisoned training data. The panel covers why LLMs shouldn't directly control capital and how Mangrove solves this by separating AI strategy research from deterministic execution. Tim and Caroline share practical guidance on human-in-the-loop frameworks, risk guardrails, stop-loss limits, and policy layers to safeguard capital. They explain how Mangrove democratizes quantitative trading for retail and institutional users, enables direct integrations with Kraken and non-custodial wallets, and builds responsible AI where software cannot execute live trades without explicit user-defined safety parameters. To learn more about Mangrove, visit www.mangrove.ai or access their app at www.mangrove.io. To learn more about AWIC, visit www.womenincrypto.org. Follow AWIC on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/the-association-for-women-in-cryptocurrency Follow AWIC on Twitter: www.twitter.com/awicglobal Special thanks to Bracewell LLP for sponsorship, and to Emily for her technical support. Bracewell is a leading law and government relations firm whose award-winning teams lead the market in cutting-edge transactions, litigation, regulatory matters, and government relations. Learn more at bracewell.com. ⚠ Our podcasts are for informational purposes only, and are not intended to provide legal, tax, financial, or investment advice. Listeners should consult their own advisors before making these types of decisions. AWIC has no responsibility or liability for any decision made or any other acts or omissions in connection with your use of this material. AWIC does not guarantee or warrant the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, suitability or validity of the information in the podcast and is not responsible for any claim attributable to errors, omissions, or other inaccuracies of any part of such material. Unless stated otherwise, reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by AWIC. Views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the podcast does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Views and opinions expressed by AWIC representatives are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organization or their sponsors.
