The investment will allow Ravelin to continue product development while growing its initial beta customer base with a view to full commercial launch later in 2015.

Ravelin is focused on helping businesses manage the fraud and payments risk that multiple payments channels are opening up. According to LexisNexis, companies trading online are typically accepting up to five different payment channels and each additional channel is another potential exposure to fraud.

Consumer demand for rapid delivery of goods and services means that the review period for transactions is constantly shrinking, and more businesses are shipping digital goods and services with none at all. As a consequence, more pressure is being placed on fraud teams. This changing profile of activity means a new type of fraud solution is required, one that uses all the data a merchant has to make better and faster decisions about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ transactions.

The Ravelin founders worked in a variety of technical, finance and fraud prevention roles at Hailo, the transport app giant. It is the experience gained there, at the leading edge of real-time and mobile payments that convinced them that the current solutions on the market were not adequate for managing fraud in modern dynamic environments.

“Our vision is simple: to give merchants a measurable advantage in the race against online fraud”, said Martin Sweeney, co-founder & CEO of Ravelin and previously founding engineer at Hailo. “Current technology properly applied allows machines to process and learn from vast amounts of data, providing better information to fraud analysts who in turn can make higher quality and faster decisions on good and bad transactions. We’re validating the technology with our beta customers and starting to see great results which we will bring to the broader ecommerce sector later this year.”
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Robert Dighero, Partner at Passion Capital who joins the Ravelin board of directors commented, “At Passion we take great pride in partnering with founding teams with ambitious vision, compelling propositions and who excel at execution. We’re impressed by the calibre of the Ravelin team and technology and look forward to working with them to address a growing and costly issue in ecommerce.”

Ravelin Beta Program is open
Online merchants who are interested in how Ravelin could improve their fraud detection and payment approval rates still have the opportunity to work with the company as part of the beta program. Participants will be required to give access to historical transaction data and work closely with the team in analysing and improving the results and Ravelin products.