By PAUL O’DONOGHUE, Senior Correspondent
ORCA Fraud has raised $2.35 million in an oversubscribed seed round to expand its real-time fraud intelligence platform across Africa and other emerging markets.
Orca Fraud said the funding follows 16 months of rapid growth.
“[This was] driven by increasing demand from banks, fintechs, telcos and payment providers operating in complex, high-velocity payment environments,” it said.
Founded by Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby, the company monitors more than $5 billion in monthly transaction volume across more than 70 countries. Orca works with major banks, telecom operators and payment providers across Africa.
Its platform embeds adaptive intelligence directly into live payment flows. This allows financial institutions to “to make instant, context-aware fraud decisions without slowing legitimate transactions”, the firm said.
Thalia Pillay, co-founder and CEO of Orca Fraud, said: “Payments are moving faster, and fraud tactics are becoming more sophisticated.”
“Our mission is to fight fraud with solutions built for each market, not assumptions borrowed from elsewhere. Fraud is contextual. Risk is situational. Financial systems can only scale when safety evolves alongside growth.”
Norrsken22 led the seed funding round, with participation from OneDayYes, Enza Capital and CV VC Africa.
Orca Fraud operations
The company said Africa’s fraud landscape differs from many developed nations due to informal economies, rapid digitisation and fragmented regulation.
Carla Wilby, co-founder and CTO of Orca Fraud, said: “African payment data is hard to access and even harder to interpret.
“It is fragmented across rails, informal in structure, and shaped by economic conditions that Western training datasets simply don’t capture.”
Nivesh Pather, principal at Norrsken22, said demand for the platform reflects a shift in how institutions approach fraud prevention.
“What stands out about Orca is how quickly the team translated deep domain expertise into an enterprise-grade platform capable of operating across markets, payment ecosystems, and fraud typologies,” he said.
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