The Future Is Now: Ilya Arbabi Of Bono Network On How Their Technological Innovations Will Shake Up The Tech Scene

As part of our series about cutting-edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ilya Arbabi.

Ilya Arbabi is a seasoned entrepreneur born and raised in Iran. He is the co-founder of Bono Network, an AI-powered platform that provides low-cost and tailored legal guidance to everyday individuals and supercharges lawyers and legal professionals. Driven and resilient from a young age, Arbabi earned a medal in the Astrophysics Olympiad in his home country before moving to the UK to study electrical engineering at Manchester University.

Since finishing his studies, Ilya has been relentless in his entrepreneurial endeavours. First developing a strength-tracking glove and smart soles using velostat sensors to measure force during workouts. Due to his Iranian heritage, he struggled to secure investment and pivoted toward the cryptocurrency markets, which are accessible to all regardless of location or identity. He developed his own cryptocurrency index fund strategy, transforming modest sums into millions.

Arbabi parlayed his expertise with blockchain technologies and engineering background into developing the Bono Network, a deeply personal project inspired by his own challenges navigating the legal system in Turkey which ultimately resulted in the loss of his cryptocurrency fortune and his mother. He's now on a mission to build something that helps people, not just for the elite, in navigating the legal system via the Bono Network.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

My current career path is motivated by the tremendous amounts of injustice I faced in my younger years, which completely changed my career trajectory for the better. In 2015--18, I studied electrical engineering at the University of Manchester and hoped to do my postgraduate studies in the US. I received offers from multiple Ivy league universities, but Covid-19 hit and that made it difficult to get my student visa approved. Relations between Iran, my home country, and the US are not particularly strong, so Iranians need to travel to either Turkey or UAE for visa approvals. Unfortunately due to the pandemic, these embassies stopped receiving applications from third-party countries.

I desperately wanted to be in the US because only a handful of universities in the USA focus on the area I was interested in, Brain Computer Interactions. I met a lawyer in Turkey who told me I could get a second citizenship there and then apply as a Turkish citizen through the US Embassy. He put me in touch with a real estate agency, claiming that if I invested in real estate then I could earn citizenship in the country. I sent them the money for the investment, however, the lawyer and the agency were in cahoots and part of a criminal syndicate. They took all my money from the investment and also came to our place of residence in Izmir, hurting my mother, and taking all our belongings such as her wedding rings and my crypto assets. We tried to get a second lawyer involved, but he took more money and didn't help. The third lawyer, which we paid for with a loan, did help in discovering that there were 15 other victims to this group, but nothing has been resolved since.

As you I am sure you can imagine, I had a horrific experience with a legal system that is supposed to protect individuals and bring justice. I don't want anyone to ever have to experience this in the future, so I am using my engineering background and experience with blockchain technologies to build a platform, known as the Bono Network, that provides low-cost and accessible legal guidance regardless of jurisdiction. It's ideal for our modern world where we are increasingly living and working in a borderless manner. My career is now fully focused on building this tool. It's a tool that I wish I had when I was trying to navigate the complexities of a legal system in a country I knew very little about. For example, in Turkey they charge clients dollars, under the table, and it never gets reported. That blows my mind. It's a country where the median income is $600, so if you want to go and talk with a lawyer then you're immediately out of money within the first 15 minutes of a conversation. It's madness. Being a foreigner and dealing with another country's legal system is akin to being blindfolded in the jungle. It doesn't just happen in Turkey, it happens all over. We hope our tool can disrupt these broken systems through simplifying legal proceedings for everyday people and good lawyers alike.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

I've never had a traditional career because of how my life has unfolded. My skill set never quite fit in Iran working for someone or building a career there never made sense. At the same time, I was practically unemployable outside of Iran unless I secured a second citizenship or a work visa in another country.

That left me with two options: find a way out through entrepreneurship or remain stuck. So, I had to carve my own path, navigating geopolitical barriers, financial hurdles, and outright scams. Every challenge forced me to adapt and think differently, and in the process, I built something of my own.

Can you tell us about the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?

Inspired by my own struggles trying to navigate another country's legal system and dealing with fraudulent legal advisors, I wanted to develop a low-cost tool that would help anyone, regardless of jurisdiction, with their legal needs. This became Bono Network, an AI-driven legal platform.

At the core of our network is Arbiter, an AI-powered legal assistant that provides tailored guidance suited to an individual's legal needs. Arbiter helps individuals find legal support without needing to fork out extortionate sums of money. It provides initial consultations on a range of legal services -- whether that's drafting an employment contract or pursuing action following a crypto scam. It determines case eligibility, calculates potential recoverable damages, and recommends next steps, and finally it can route the user to an actual lawyer to confirm everything.

What's groundbreaking about Arbiter is that it's powered by multiple AI agents. Our core agents leverage advanced LLMs, RAGs, and vector embeddings to deliver real-time insights tailored to each legal case. It's already having an impact in the real world, having won all its cases in small claims courts so far in the UK, Denmark, Turkey, and Macedonia.

We've also designed the network to be future-proof. It has a blockchain back-end leveraging the Zero Knowledge (ZK) proofs to provide transparency. We've also built CrowdSue, a first-of-its-kind tool where complex cases, which are too large or expensive for individuals to tackle alone, can be escalated, enabling collective action. This could completely change the balance of power in the legal world, putting power back into the hands of everyday people.

How do you think this might change the world?

Bono Network exists so that what happened to me doesn't happen to others. If I had access to a real legal advisor -- not a scammer -- I wouldn't have lost all my money. With Bono regardless of how much money you have or where you're from, you can access unbiased legal advice. Having an easy-to-use tool like Bono could completely disrupt the legal industry. There's now a growing acceptance of legal tech brought on by the digital shift following the pandemic and Bono is ready to capture this interest.

Bono connects people with AI-powered legal assistants that provide low-cost tailored legal guidance. An expert voice who understands international law and gives real, objective guidance -- regardless of nationality, gender, or background. It acts as a buffer between you and the legal industry, making sure you get the right lawyer and the best service possible. It's about protecting people and making legal help accessible to everyone.

Keeping "Black Mirror" in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks of this technology that people should think more deeply about?

At its core, AI is about decision-making. Large language models work by predicting the next word in a sentence based on probabilities -- some dictated by grammar, others by context. For example, if you start a sentence with "killing a toddler is", an AI model trained on the collective knowledge of humanity will overwhelmingly predict this as being "bad" because literature, philosophy, and human ethics have reinforced that conclusion for centuries.

But things get more complicated with context. The sentence "stealing is..." will likely result in a "bad" prediction 95% of the time. But what if you add "stealing from a thief"? Now the AI might say it's only 60% "bad." Stealing from a murderous psychopath? It might even say it's "good." The deeper you go into moral ambiguity, the more AI enters a grey zone where its choices are no longer obvious -- or even predictable.

We may see a world where rules are enforced by AI-powered judges or challenged by AI-powered lawyers or maybe even something more autonomous. The Black Mirror scenario is that we train AI on human morality, but something goes horribly wrong, a subtle flaw buried deep in the system causes a cascade of catastrophic decisions.

To prevent this, AI safety research is crucial. But there's another problem: many AI researchers and engineers, while brilliant in their fields, are not experts in human psychology, philosophy, or ethics. If we're building AI that will make moral decisions, we need a global, multidisciplinary council guiding its development -- experts in philosophy, Jungian and Eastern thought, ethics, and the evolution of human morality.

Otherwise, we risk creating an AI that appears logical and fair until one day, a hidden flaw in its reasoning leads to unintended and irreversible consequences.

Was there a "tipping point" that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?

The "tipping point" for me was when we reached the third lawyer in trying to resolve my case and get justice against the criminal syndicate who scammed me and still nothing had changed. I realized that there had to be a way to disrupt the legal system and make this easier to navigate, especially for individuals seeking legal support in foreign countries. Luckily this realization collided with developments in blockchain technology. I had a lightbulb moment that we could use blockchain and AI technologies to improve the system and because of my engineering background and experience with cryptocurrency trading, I knew it would be possible to build the Bono Network and, so, I got to work.

What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?

We have an ambitious goal to become the leading global SaaS platform for affordable legal services. Everyone who has joined the team so far or who has helped has been driven by a passion for the idea and knowledge that this is a worthwhile vision. Now we are looking for partners who share this passion and can also provide funding support that will help turbocharge the platform's growth and help position Bono as the leading platform for affordable legal services.

What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?

It's a balancing act. We are currently in semi stealth. We need some attention so that law firms will join our High Table service, a global network of firms and investors who deal with more complex cases brought to Arbiter. At the same, we aren't publicizing the network yet and not seeking to onboard new users. However, we have had a select group of users test the tools while in stealth mode, which is where we observed Arbiter's powers as it won all its cases in small claims courts so far in the UK, Denmark, Turkey, and Macedonia.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My dad. He gave me that initial energy to just keep pushing. Otherwise, I'd lost everything. And there was no coming back.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

I don't believe I am "successful" yet in the traditional sense. But I have experienced some success in my life with my achievements in academia and crypto trading and I am now using those skills to build a platform that will make legal services more accessible. I hope that Bono Network will have an impact on the individuals who have traditionally been left behind by the legal system whether it's due to their finances or jurisdiction. The good I want to bring to the world is that I helped democratize legal services globally.

What are your "5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started" and why?

Wealth Without a Network Is a Weak Foundation -- When I first got money, I had a good amount of money but no real connections, no strong network. I thought wealth alone would open doors, but it doesn't. If I could do it over, I would have invested more in relationships, building a personal brand, and surrounding myself with people who could support and guide me.
Trust Is Your Greatest Currency -- But It's Also Your Biggest Risk -- I trusted the wrong people and paid the price. I wish someone had told me that trust should be earned slowly, not given freely especially in business. At the same time, without trust, you can't build anything meaningful. The key is knowing who to trust.
Life Isn't a Level Playing Field -- Some people start life on "easy mode," and others, like me, don't. Being Iranian meant I had to go through more hoops than someone born in the U.S. or Europe. I had to build everything without the advantages of an established network, easy access to global markets, or even basic mobility. I had to deal with biases and things people assume just because where you were born. If I had understood earlier just how much harder my path would be, I would have planned differently by investing in the right people and structures to navigate those extra challenges.
Resilience Matters -- When things are going well, it's easy to think you're invincible. But things will go wrong, and how you handle failure is what determines your future. I lost everything at one point, and what kept me going wasn't my past success -- it was my ability to adapt and start again.
Your Reputation Is More Valuable Than Your Bank Account -- Money comes and goes, but your reputation stays with you. I learned this the hard way. If you don't actively shape how people perceive you, someone else will and it might not be in your favour.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

If I could inspire a movement, it would be about restoring trust in institutions by making them accessible, efficient, and accountable starting with the legal system. Too often, people feel powerless against corruption, inefficiency, and bureaucracy. Bono is my attempt at fixing that, creating a bridge between individuals and the institutions meant to protect them.

Imagine someone in a remote village, in a country where justice is unreliable, being able to access a fair, unbiased legal advisor who actually understands international law and can guide them rather than being scammed or ignored. That's where change starts. If we rebuild trust at the individual level, we can restore faith in institutions as a whole.

If we get this right, we can create something that actually works for people not just for the elite. That's the movement I'd want to build.

Can you please give us your favorite "Life Lesson Quote"? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

"Inveniam viam aut faciam" -- "I will either find a way or build one."

Whenever I face adversity, this serves as a reminder that there's always a path forward even if I have to create it myself. It keeps me going, pushing through obstacles, and refusing to give up until I achieve what I set out to do.

Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say?

The legal world is ready to be disrupted. Rising legal costs have priced millions out of seeking justice. Individuals will inevitably start using AI for help with their legal needs, but when they do, they should be using a trusted tool. That's where Bono Network comes in. We are fast becoming the global SaaS platform for affordable legal services.

It's a $900 billion total addressable market that is ripe for cost reduction and innovation. We are one of the first movers in disrupting this. We already have a full suite of tools that are easy-to-use and will democratize legal services. And our GitLaw tool is continually updated with global legal changes keeping our system trained on the cutting edge of what's happening in the legal world. Already we are seeing our significant real-world impact in stealth mode and we need partners who can help drive our expansion and growth, so that when things go wrong, they come to Bono.

This article was originally published in Authority Magazine.