Ravelin, the London-based fraud and risk prediction company, today announced an £8M Series B round led by BlackFin Capital Partners to expand its
overseas business and extend its market reach.
Existing investors including Amadeus Capital Partners, Passion Capital, and Playfair Capital also participated in the round.
The funding underpins Ravelin’s expansion plans including a new office in the US. The company has also developed a product for Payment Service Providers. The fraud detection company will continue to invest in capabilities complementary to its core of chargeback protection, notably in account security and risk prediction.
Ravelin works directly with online merchants and their payment service providers to reduce losses to fraud and to improve acceptance rates of orders. Ravelin’s choice of machine learning techniques to do this has proven to be both highly effective and extremely cost efficient for its clients. In the last year leading businesses including eShopWorld, Just Eat, Kinguin, and Quiqup have joined its enterprise client portfolio and the company is now helping secure their transactions across 96 countries.
The company’s founders have firmly established Ravelin as a major player in the fraud detection landscape over the last four years. Chargebacks, account takeovers, organised fraud rings and terms of service abuse continues to be a multi-billion dollar problem for the online commerce industry.
“The growing sophistication and audacity of fraud attacks on businesses is a significant threat to online commerce,” said Martin Sweeney, CEO and Founder of Ravelin. “This funding will allow us to accelerate with new and existing clients a range of options to nullify this threat and help them grow their thriving online businesses securely. There is no greater endorsement of our approach than the companies we’ve been able to add to our portfolio. We’re proud that many of the world’s leading online businesses have chosen to work with us. We’ll continue to serve them well.”
Sweeney continued: “We are really happy to welcome BlackFin on board. Their focus on the payments sector provides strong market knowledge and a network that will play an important role as we extend our offerings to PSPs and banks.”
“We were impressed not only with what the team at Ravelin have achieved already in terms of products and customer references, but with the size of the opportunity that lies ahead of them,” said Laurent Bouyoux, Founding Partner of BlackFin Capital Partners who led the round. “Using artificial intelligence to solve complex, real-world business problems at scale is in its infancy. Securing e-commerce is incredibly important to the prosperity of developed economies and Ravelin is at the forefront of doing just that,”added Maxime Mandin, Investment Director at BlackFin.