Ravelin, a firm that uses machine-learning to detect and fight fraud, has raised £3 million in funding. Lead investor Playfair Capital was joined by Amadeus Capital, Passion Capital, Errol Damelin (founder of Wonga) and Paul Foster (founder of Indeed.com).
Headquartered in London, Ravelin is a smarter fraud detection and prevention platform for businesses that need to make accurate payment fraud decisions quickly. It was founded with the insight that the on-demand economy was served poorly when it comes combating fraud.
The Ravelin team has developed first-class technology to address the growing problem of online payment fraud, harnessing the power of Machine Learning to score transaction reliability in real time. It analyzes customer behaviour and transactions using powerful proprietary data science and machine learning technologies, and works closely with merchants to provide extremely accurate fraud detection scores. This addresses a large and very important market opportunity. Martin Sweeney, CEO of Ravelin, said,
We have focused squarely on growing the company by doing a great job for our clients. This investment enables us to continue to grow our team and invest in the infrastructure and technology we need to give the same great experience to even more clients based around the world.
This latest round follows the seed funding secured by Ravelin from Passion Capital in March 2014. After that, the company – which claims to serve Deliveroo and US-based taxi service Via Taxi – went on to close a £1.3m funding round in September of the same year.
Since the initial release of the product, Ravelin has been busy adding features and adopting techniques to allow its clients to accept more legitimate orders and refuse those which are suspicious. For example, the company launched its graph network technology in May which has shut down many thousands of fake accounts and prevented millions of pounds worth of potential fraud.
Speaking about the raise, Nathan Benaich, partner at Playfair Capital, commented,
We are delighted to have led this round. Ravelin has achieved impressive market traction by building fraud detection technology from the ground up to address the ongoing issue of payment fraud. This problem is growing faster than online commerce and Ravelin’s machine learning approach brings the requisite speed, scale and performance to solve it efficiently.
