By 
Cape Town-based fintech Orca Fraud has raised US$2.35 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round to expand its real-time transaction monitoring and fraud intelligence platform across emerging markets.
The funding round was led by Norrsken22, with participation from OneDayYes, Enza Capital and CV VC Africa, according to Tech Africa News.
Founded by Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby, the company has grown rapidly over the past 16 months amid rising demand from banks, fintech firms, telecommunications companies and payment providers operating in complex digital payment environments.
Orca Fraud said its platform currently monitors more than US$5 billion in monthly transaction volumes across over 70 countries, with many of its clients among Africa’s major financial institutions.
Unlike traditional fraud monitoring tools that operate separately from payment systems, Orca integrates its adaptive intelligence directly into live payment flows, enabling it to assess behaviour and flag suspicious activity before transactions are completed.
The approach is particularly relevant in African markets where mobile wallets and agent banking systems dominate and fraud attempts can move quickly across multiple payment channels.
Chief Executive Officer Pillay said fraud risks in emerging markets are highly contextual and require solutions designed for local financial ecosystems rather than models adapted from other regions.
“Financial systems can only scale sustainably when security evolves alongside growth,” she said.
Read More: Zambia signs deal with UK firm to integrate AI into country’s education system
Chief Technology Officer Wilby said the company built its platform to learn directly from African payment data, which is often fragmented across different financial rails and differs significantly from Western datasets.
The system also benefits from cross-market intelligence, where fraud patterns detected in one country can improve detection capabilities in others.
Norrsken22 principal, Nivesh Pather, said Orca Fraud had become a critical infrastructure provider for companies managing fraud risks in fast-moving payment systems.
John Lazar of Enza Capital said fraud management had become a core operational priority as Africa’s financial systems become increasingly interconnected.
The company plans to use the funding to deepen integrations with banks and telecommunications firms, expand its machine learning models using larger African datasets, and explore growth opportunities in Latin America and Southeast Asia.
Orca Fraud also aims to build infrastructure capable of handling ten times its current transaction volumes while expanding detection capabilities to address emerging threats such as AI-generated account takeovers.
WARNING! All rights reserved. This material, and other digital content on this website, may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or in part without prior express permission from ZAMBIA MONITOR.
Comments