Summary
ForbesPredict by Axiom is a gamified prediction market launched on Forbes.com which reaches more than 140 million people per month. The brief was twofold: ship the product through fully agentic workflows with rapid iteration cycles, and meet the regulatory bar required to operate at that scale.
Engagement was as Fractional CTO/CISO — leading both the development trajectory and the security/compliance posture, so the two never traded off against each other.
Approach
- Harness engineering — owned the architecture and built guardrails into the agentic workflow itself: spec-driven development, automated code review, and continuous gap analysis. The harness lets a lean team move on tight iteration cycles without trading off correctness.
- Secure & Compliance-by-design — security and privacy built in from day one. Authentication, encryption, access control, and audit trails designed against the threat model the category demands; complex country-based regulations such as GDPR & CCPA shape data flow, retention, and consent.
- Operate at scale — runtime architecture sized for the forbes.com audience: event streaming through Kafka, edge logic on Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects + Queues, persistent backend on AWS, business logic written in Effect-TS for predictable error and concurrency semantics.