Financial crime fighter Feedzai has secured a growth investment of $200 million. Product development, partner strategy, and global expansion are three Feedzai priorities that will be accelerated by the new investment.
The Series D round was led by KKR, and featured participation from existing investors Sapphire Ventures and Citi Ventures. The company’s total capital now stands north of $277 million, having most recently raised $50 million in a 2017 Series C round.
“This new investment delivers on our mission to keep commerce safe by further developing our single machine learning cloud platform for all four stages of the customer risk journey: prevention, detection, remediation, and compliance,” Feedzai CEO Nuno Sebastiao wrote on the company blog this week. “Focusing on the entirety of the risk lifecycle,” he added, “allows us to partner with financial services in a radically new way at every step of the journey.”
The funding also gives the risk management platform a valuation “well over $1 billion” the company noted in its funding announcement.
Partnered with some of the largest financial institutions in the world – including four of the five largest banks in North America, Feedzai leverages its risk management platform to monitor activity at companies with more than 800 million customers in 190 countries. The firm’s platform leverages machine learning and AI to help companies defend themselves from financial crimes including money laundering, detecting fraud in less than three milliseconds.
A Finovate alum since 2014, Feedzai unveiled its Feedzai Fairband solution earlier this month. Feedzai Fairband is an AutoML algorithm-based technology that automatically discovers less biased machine learning models while increasing model fairness by as much as 93% on average. Dubbed “the world’s most advanced AI fairness framework,” Feedzai Fairband enables financial institutions to accommodate their customers fairly and without the bias that even the most carefully-designed AI models may still hold.
“Feedzai Fairband is one of the biggest milestones in the financial services industry as it presents a low-cost, no-friction framework to address one of the biggest problems of our era – AI bias,” Feedzai Chief Scientist Dr. Pedro Bizrro said. “By creating the most advanced framework for AI fairness, Feedzai is allowing financial institutions to incorporate a critical piece of technology that addresses a problem under close public scrutiny with proven damaging effects across the globe. Building accurate and fairer models will be less challenging from now on.”
Named to Techround’s roster of the top 50 fintech companies in the U.K. in February, Feedzai highlighted the “skyrocketing” rise in fraud attacks in 2020 in its Financial Crime Report Q1, 2021, released earlier this month.
“2020 was a year of rapid growth in financial crime. Fraudsters tried to take advantage of the convergence between a fast-paced digital environment and a new wave of inexperienced consumers to perpetrate a multitude of attacks that created a significant uptick in fraud,” Jaime Ferreira, Senior Director of Global Data Science at Feedzai said in the report. “Financial institutions need to further invest in technologies to protect their customers while developing educational approaches. Robust technology and informed consumers are a powerful combination when fighting financial crime.”
Feedzai began the year with an announcement that Latin America’s largest investment bank, BTG Pactual, will implement Feedzai’s financial crime management technology.