Barclays Techstars alumnus secures funding from leading VCs and angel investors to deepen its machine learning approach to help businesses accept payments more securely online
Ravelin is a smarter fraud detection and prevention platform for businesses that need to make accurate fraud decisions in real-time. It is pioneering the use of data science, anomaly detection and machine learning to identify bad actors more effectively online. This allows businesses not only to accept more transactions with greater confidence but also to reduce the number of ‘false positives’ – that is, turning away legitimate customers because of poor signal detection.
Leading UK technology VCs Amadeus Capital Partners, Playfair Capital and Passion Capital invested from the institutional side. They were joined by angel investors Errol Damelin (Wonga founder), Paul Forster (Indeed.com founder), Gigi Levy (ex-CEO of 888 Holdings and investor in Kenshoo) and Jeremy Millar (Partner at Magister Advisors). The round follows on from Passion’s initial seed round in February 2015.
“As tech-savvy merchants in a previous on-demand business we knew that machine learning and AI techniques would give us much richer insight into who was using our app legitimately and who was not.’ said Martin Sweeney, CEO at Ravelin. “Starting Ravelin has given us the opportunity to develop on that insight and bring it to market. This investment and the commitment from our early customers makes us very confident we can deliver to the general on-demand market the type of payments confidence seen only amongst the giants of the ecommerce world.”
“Ravelin’s team has developed first-class technology to address the growing problem of online fraud, harnessing the power of machine learning to score transaction reliability in real time. This addresses a large and very important market opportunity.” said Alex van Someren, Managing Partner of Amadeus’ Early Stage funds, and co-founder of Europe’s first cybersecurity accelerator Cyber London. “Online fraud has the potential to restrict the growth of on-demand companies, but Ravelin’s technology will enable them to trade with confidence.”
Funding to expand the team, operations and customer base
Ravelin has grown its technical team significantly over the last six months, thereby accelerating product development and new partnerships. The new funding will allow it to grow even further, to attract new and support existing customers, as well as expand the company’s machine learning, signals intelligence and partnership capabilities.
About Amadeus
Amadeus Capital Partners is a leading technology investor. Since its inception in 1997 the firm has raised over $1bn for investment and backed more than 100 companies in the software, mobile, internet, cyber security and medical technology sectors. The investment team is global (UK, Sweden, USA, India and South Africa), has deep experience in technology and invests in high-growth companies at all stages of development, from seed and early stage to pre-IPO.
Major businesses built by Amadeus include CSR (LSE:CSR), a connectivity, audio, imaging and location semiconductor company; Solexa, the developer of next generation genetic analysis systems, merged into Illumina (ILMN) to create the world leader in gene-sequencing technology, Octo Telematics, the global leader in insurance telematics services acquired by Renova Group; and Transmode (ST:TRMO), an optical networking solutions business. For more information, please visit http://www.amadeuscapital.com
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About Ravelin
Ravelin provides fraud detection for the on-demand economy. We analyse customer behaviour and transactions using powerful proprietary data science and machine learning technologies, and work closely with merchants to provide extremely accurate fraud detection scores.
Information and decisions are instant, allowing payments to be accepted with confidence at the speed needed to build a dynamic business. Merchants can focus on growing the business confident that Ravelin is protecting them from fraud risk.