Feedzai raises $200 million in Series D to grow risk management platform

By Sunniva Kolostyak

Cloud-based financial risk management platform Feedzai has announced a $200 million Series D funding round, led by KKR with participation from existing investors Sapphire Ventures and Citi Ventures.

The Series D pushes Feedzai’s valuation well above $1 billion, making it the first FinTech unicorn in Portugal. The company intends to use the funds to strengthen its position as one of the most comprehensive financial crime prevention and risk management solution in the market by accelerating global expansion, further developing its product offerings, and boost its partner strategy.

The investment comes as the shift to digital banking and e-commerce mean consumers are increasingly becoming victims of financial crime. According to Feedzai’s data on the last quarter of 2020, consumers faced a 650 per cent increase in account takeover scams, a 600 per cent increase in impersonation scams, and a 250 per cent increase in online banking fraud attacks compared to the first quarter in the same year.

Nuno Sebastiao, CEO, and Chairman of Feedzai, commented: “Feedzai’s technology is the cornerstone of today’s commerce as consumers across the globe expect fast, reliable, seamless, and, above all, secure banking and payment experiences. The world has faster digitisation requirements, and financial institutions need reliable solutions that thrive in this new digital environment in days, not months.”

Also commenting, Stephen Shanley, Managing Director at global investment firm KKR, added: “Feedzai offers a powerful solution to one of the biggest challenges we are facing today: financial crime in the digital age. Global commerce depends on future-proof technologies capable of dealing with a rapidly evolving threat landscape. At the same time, consumers rightfully demand a great customer experience, in addition to strong security layers when using banking or payments services.”

Feedzai’s platform is used by financial institutions, payment providers, and merchants to manage the risk of financial crime while enabling an optimised experience for end-users. The core of Feedzai’s offering is its artificial intelligence and machine learning platform, which processes customer and third-party data to identify, assess, and accelerate the remediation of potential threats.

This enables higher rates of financial crime detection with lower rates of false positives in contrast to legacy approaches. This leads to cost savings, fewer chargebacks, more efficient triage of alerts and avoidance of regulatory fines.

Today, Feedzai monitors companies with more than 800 million customers in 190 countries, with products protecting half of the UK’s and Canada’s populations, as well as four of the five largest banks in North America.