fraud-prevention
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Outseer’s $5 Trillion Question: Is the Customer Being Conned?
A familiar phone. A valid password. A payment the customer really approved. Outseer is building its fraud defenses around the uncomfortable possibility that all three can be true and the money can still be stolen.
Upstream Finds the Sale After the Click
The mobile marketing company turns operator channels, fraud checks and well-timed messages into customer acquisitions. Its most revealing work happens where an ordinary advertising campaign would stop.
Celebrus wants to catch the customer before the click is history
The British software company turns live browsing behavior into marketing decisions and fraud signals. Its bet: the most useful customer data is the data you can act on before somebody leaves.
Shufti wants to make proving you are you less of a production
A frustrating identity check helped inspire Shufti. Now the company is betting that businesses will buy verification, fraud checks and ongoing monitoring from the same place.
Trustonic bets on the phone that can lock itself
A phone that stops working after a missed payment is a powerful incentive. Trustonic is turning that control into a business built around smartphone credit, as its old secure operating system reaches the end of the road.
GBG wants to let the right people in
The British identity specialist grew by buying the machinery of digital trust. Now it must make those pieces work together - while a fresh setback in America tests its recovery.
iProov Wants Your Face to Prove It Was There
A face can be copied. A moment is harder to steal. iProov uses light, biometrics and a watchful security team to check who is really on the other side of the screen.
Callsign Wants Your Bank to Recognize Your Touch
A password can be stolen. The way you swipe tells a different story. Callsign is turning everyday gestures into evidence of identity - and giving banks a way to decide when to ask for more.
Thirdfort’s £25,000 reason to check the paperwork
A friend lost a home deposit despite the anti-fraud checks. Thirdfort’s founders built a business around the gap between collecting documents and understanding what they prove.
Yoti Wants Your Face for One Second - And Almost Nothing Else
The British identity company spent years building a wallet for facts about you. Its breakout product asks for less: a glance at a camera, a yes-or-no answer, then deletion.
The Fraud Fighter That Learned to Say Yes
Ravelin began with a taxi app’s fraud problem and built a business around a counterintuitive promise: stop the thieves without turning good customers away. Worldpay bought the company in 2025 - but the more revealing story is how five engineers made restraint into a product.
The $1.2 Billion Company Hiding Under Your Debit Card
Galileo spent nearly two decades becoming the quiet operating system for digital banks. Now, after a $1.2 billion sale, a costly outage and the exit of a giant client, its next trick is turning invisible plumbing into a full financial stack.
Wink Wanted to Kill the Password. Then It Found the Payment Rails.
Wink began with a clever premise: any ordinary camera could become a checkout credential. Its 2025 merger with Phoenix Managed Networks turned that identity layer into a payments business with real rails, real distribution and a much harder question about trust.
GrailPay Built the Trust Layer Only After Its First Payment Idea Failed
GrailPay spent years building a cheaper consumer checkout that merchants did not urgently want. The failed pitch left behind something more valuable: payment infrastructure, failure data and a map of the risk hiding inside bank transfers.
The $400 Million Bet to Give Small Banks a Megabank Brain
Alkami spent years perfecting the banking app. Then it paid $400 million to own the moment before the first login - and turned a useful utility into a growth machine for community finance.
Two Brothers Got Burned by Chargebacks. Now 20,000 Merchants Trust Chargeflow to Fight Back.
Ariel and Avia Chen built the tool they could not buy: software that spots risky orders, intercepts disputes and assembles the paperwork while merchants keep selling. The sharper idea is not the AI - it is charging when the ugly work produces a result.
The Checkout Company Trying to Give Game Makers Their Store Back
Apple, Google and Steam made game distribution easy - and expensive. Xsolla built a 20-year business around the awkward alternative: helping studios sell directly, get paid locally and keep the player relationship.
The $10 Trillion Supplier Ledger: How Apex Analytix Turned Payment Mistakes Into a Risk Platform
A 1988 recovery-audit shop now watches the supplier records behind more than $10 trillion in annual spend. Its real product is not a dashboard - it is the moment a company stops trusting bad data by default.
Liminal Sold the Conference. Now It Wants to Be the Memory of the Identity Market.
A consultancy born around digital identity sold its signature event, turned years of buyer evidence into software, and raised $8.5 million to make market intelligence behave less like a report and more like infrastructure.
The $5.3 Billion Deal That Died - and the API That Got Bigger
Plaid was supposed to disappear into Visa. Instead, the blocked $5.3 billion sale left it free to turn a bank-linking button into a broader financial intelligence network - with a valuation reset, a privacy reckoning and one very copyable startup lesson along the way.
Melissa Spent 40 Years Fixing the Customer Data Everyone Else Ignores
The California company started by mailing ZIP-code databases on floppy disks. Four decades later, its pitch is still disarmingly practical: stop a bad address, dead email or duplicate customer before the mistake gets expensive.
Appgate Escaped the VPN Bottleneck - Then Had to Escape Its Own Balance Sheet
Its direct-routed Zero Trust software promised to remove the chokepoints created by legacy VPNs. After a public-market detour ended in Chapter 11, Appgate is testing whether a cleaner balance sheet can do the same for the business.
Chargeback Gurus Turned the Refund Desk Into a Revenue Machine
Most merchants treat chargebacks as expensive paperwork. Chargeback Gurus treats them as a trail of clues - then uses software, data and specialists to stop the next dispute before it lands.
Alloy Took 100 Investor Noes. Now It Helps 900 Banks Say Yes.
The founders started with a failed nightlife app, found a sharper problem inside bank payments, and endured 100 investor rejections. Their reward is a quiet piece of infrastructure that helps more than 900 financial institutions approve good customers without giving fraudsters a free pass.
Bureau Raised $50.5 Million to Answer the Internet's Most Expensive Question: Who Can You Trust?
Point solutions can verify a document and still miss the fraud ring holding it. Bureau's bet is that the winning risk product is not another check, but the connective tissue between every check.
Prove's Quiet Trick: Catch More Fraud by Asking Good Customers to Do Less
The New York identity company built a business around an awkward truth: every extra fraud check can also chase away a real customer. Its answer is to make the phone do more of the proving - quietly, continuously and before another form gets in the way.
The Bank Security Company That Wants You to Notice Almost Nothing
Entersekt built a global financial-authentication business around a stubborn idea: the best security step is often the one a legitimate customer never sees. Now its bet is moving from a protected phone to one context-aware layer across banking and payments.
Pindrop Bet the Voice Was a Fingerprint. Then AI Learned to Wear It
The Atlanta security company spent a decade proving that every call leaves clues. Deepfakes turned that niche insight into a much bigger business - and a warning for any company that still treats a familiar voice as proof.
The Chicago Startup That Wants to Make Waiting for Money Feel as Weird as Waiting for a Fax
Daniel Lev and Benjamin Meeder built a payment layer on stablecoins instead of the batch files banks still run on. Two years in, Pantera wrote a $25M check and revenue is up 23x.
Inscribe's $38 Million Lesson for AI Builders: Start With the Messy Queue, Not the Model
The fintech front door looked instant. Behind it sat a queue of people checking PDFs by hand. Inscribe built a business in that queue - then had to rebuild itself when higher rates and generative AI changed both its customers and the fraud it was chasing.