Capital One has long positioned itself as a technology company that does banking, not the other way around. But what’s lesser known—even inside tech circles—is that the company now has a growing enterprise software business selling commercial cloud tools to other organizations.

Its latest launch, Databolt, a patented tokenization solution built for the AI era, is being led by a longtime Dallas-Fort Worth-based executive.

Ravi Raghu, president of Capital One Software, leads the financial giant’s commercial software arm from North Texas, where the Virginia-based company maintains a major corporate footprint with a campus in Plano—home to thousands of employees across engineering, analytics, and digital product teams.

The Databolt launch arrives at a time when companies are eager to adopt AI—but hesitant to expose sensitive data.

Traditional security models focus on locking down data by restricting access and limiting its use to prevent breaches. Tokenization offers another path to data usability, according to the company.

“Tokenization can be a game changer,” Raghu said in an announcement last week. With increasing cyber incidents, more complex privacy requirements, and the rise of generative AI, he added, the need for “next-level security” has never been higher.

A model inspired by Amazon—and a built-in ‘alpha client’

In a recent Forbes feature, Capital One’s enterprise software strategy was compared to a well-known model: Amazon Web Services (AWS). Just as Amazon built infrastructure to support its own e-commerce operations—then turned that internal solution into a global business—Capital One followed a similar path.

Its shift to the public cloud exposed challenges that off-the-shelf tools couldn’t solve. So the company built its own—and eventually began offering those solutions externally through Capital One Software.

Raghu told Forbes that Capital One became its own “alpha client” for its software division, running over 100 billion token operations per month before releasing the technology to outside enterprises.

The model reflects a decade-long cultural shift. “Our journey of becoming a technology company that happens to do banking has been a decade in the making,” he said.

Raghu, a 23-year Capital One veteran, now oversees product development with a focus on enterprise-grade security and flexibility for companies beyond banking. He says technology has always been at the heart of Capital One’s operations.

He also notes that the software is “road-tested” internally by teams led by CIO Rob Alexander, then refined for broader use.

“My job is to take that capability and morph it,” Raghu told Forbes. “We ensure it’s not bespoke to Capital One, but applicable to any enterprise, with configuration flexibility and scalability built in.”

A vaultless, high-speed tokenization engine

Databolt is the second offering from Capital One Software, the enterprise B2B division launched in 2022 to bring the company’s internal cloud innovations to market.

Its latest product delivers vaultless tokenization that preserves the underlying data format—allowing companies to protect sensitive data while continuing to run applications, share data with third parties, and build responsibly with AI, according to Capital One Software.

With “lightning-fast throughput” of up to 4 million tokens per second, the company describes Databolt as an advanced security model that keeps sensitive data inside the business’s environment.

“We recognized the power of tokenization early on and built our own solution to meet the needs of a cloud-first enterprise at scale,” Raghu said. “Today, we run more than a hundred billion tokenization operations a month across hundreds of applications.”

From internal necessity to external solutions

When Capital One exposed those gaps in the market for enterprise-grade data tools, it didn’t wait for vendors to catch up. It seized the initiative on its own, before rolling out its solutions externally.

First came Slingshot, designed to optimize usage of Snowflake—a cloud data platform widely used to store and analyze large volumes of information. Powerful as it is, Snowflake can be complex to manage at enterprise scale. Slingshot helped Capital One control costs, improve performance, and govern how teams used data.

Slingshot proved that the company’s internal innovations could deliver value externally. Now Databolt builds on that foundation but addresses what Capital One sees as a broader and more urgent need: secure, scalable AI.

“When you peel back the onion, it always comes back to data,” Raghu said in Forbes.

AI-ready by design

Capital One Software designed Databolt to help organizations balance security and access in an AI-driven world. While traditional approaches may wall off data, tokenization lets enterprises unlock information value while staying secure.

“With tokenization, you can let your models learn without actually exposing the sensitive data,” Raghu told Forbes. “Generative AI demands access to as much data as possible.”

That design choice makes Databolt a foundational tool for companies rolling out LLMs and generative AI without compromising compliance or customer trust.

Among Databolt’s first adopters is Early Warning Services, the financial technology firm behind Zelle.

“Capital One has been on the leading edge of their tech journey and its experience is exactly what we value in a partner,” Walter Hurst, head of technology at Early Warning, said in a statement. “Databolt was not only easy to implement, its performance and scalability have exceeded expectations.”

More tools coming soon

Databolt is part of a broader push by Capital One Software to offer a suite of cloud-native tools. According to Raghu, that vision spans the entire data lifecycle—from publishing and governance to infrastructure management.

“We’re deeply tuned into customer feedback,” he told Forbes. “That’s what led to Databolt, and it’s how we’ll decide what comes next.”

The team will showcase Databolt at the RSAC Conference in San Francisco from April 28 to May 1.

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