Company: Fraudio

Founders: João Moura (CEO) / Robin Vastenou (Data Scientist)

*Answers provided by João Moura.

Headquarters: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Most Recent Valuation: Undisclosed

Employees: 25

Founded: 2019

In One Sentence: Fraudio provides AI that plugs into payment systems to detect fraud, money laundering, and merchant risk in real time, scoring transactions in milliseconds so providers can block bad actors without declining good customers.

Top quote: “We aren’t just scaling a company; we’re scaling a centralised defence that powers the global payments system.”

Who are you building your product/service for, and what painful problem are you taking away from their day?

Our focus is on the people responsible for the day-to-day movement of money – acquirers, issuers, processors, and fintechs. We remove the friction caused by fragmented data and reactive risk models.

Most organisations are currently forced into make-or-break choices, based only on the data they can see. We remove that blind spot, providing network-driven intelligence that allows them to stop guessing and start making more confident risk-based decisions.

If a top-tier VC is reading this, what would you want them to understand about your company in 30 seconds?

Fraud isn't something you solve with a simple fraud tool; it’s an infrastructure problem. Most companies are fighting a global war with siloed data. Fraudio has built a platform powered by a centralised, network-driven dataset to protect the entire payments ecosystem.

We’ve proved we can outperform legacy models; our API-first, fully SaaS infrastructure scales with ease, and we’re already protecting billions of transactions globally. We aren’t selling a theory; we’re selling proven results.

Why has nobody else done what you’re doing?

Most legacy vendors rely on manual rules or complex AI models that are hard to understand and take six months just to calibrate. We’ve taken a different path, building a unified transaction risk platform that spans the entire payment stack. While others look at transactions in isolation, we look at the global context. It’s the difference between looking at a single puzzle piece and seeing the whole picture.

What was the “this has to exist” moment that made you start the company?

During my time as Head of Data Science at Payvision, I saw firsthand how fraud is an interconnected, global threat, yet the tools we had to fight it were both fragmented and reactive. I realised that unless we built a platform that allowed the entire ecosystem to benefit from collective intelligence, fraud networks would always have the upper hand. Fraudio was born because the industry needed a way to level the playing field.

How do you make money? Which part of your business model are you most excited about scaling?

We operate on an API-first, fully SaaS model. What excites me most is the compounding value of our network effect. As we scale and more organisations join the platform, our dataset becomes richer and our AI becomes sharper. We aren’t just scaling a company; we’re scaling a centralised defence that powers the global payments system.

Which proof points matter most right now?

For us, it’s all about quantifiable impact. We recently went head-to-head with a leading global vendor in a blind test and delivered 40% fewer false positives. When you’re processing billions of transactions across 188 countries, that isn't just a marginal gain; it’s a massive commercial advantage for our clients.

How does your product/service make the world a better place?

Fundamentally, we are opening up access to safer commerce. Truly effective fraud intelligence shouldn't be a luxury reserved for the largest financial institutions. By making this level of protection easy to deploy and accessible to underserved markets, we are helping to build a more inclusive and trustworthy global economy.

What’s been your biggest unexpected challenge so far, and what did it force you to learn quickly?

Early on, we worked with three processors across three different continents, all with completely inconsistent data structures. We learned very quickly that unified infrastructure is everything. We chose to build a single, centralised platform rather than work across siloed datasets. It was a huge undertaking, but it’s now our greatest competitive advantage.

What does success look like in 12 months? What about in 5 years?

In 12 months, success is being integrated into every major payment rail, making Fraudio’s real-time protection available to any processor.

In 5 years, I want Fraudio to be the centralised brain that powers global payments. When a merchant anywhere in the world accepts a payment, they should be able to do so with total confidence because our real-time intelligence is running in the background.

What type of partner or collaborator would most accelerate your journey right now? (If relevant, which roles are you hiring for?)

We are looking for distribution partners, the processors and payment gateways who move the world’s money. We want to work with organisations who are tired of black-box AI and are looking for a Plug & Protect solution that provides measurable outcomes from day one.

Finish this sentence: “We’ll know we’ve really made it when…”

...when our data is used across the industry to take the guesswork out of risk and help more legitimate transactions get approved.”

Website: www.fraudio.com

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