Company Attracts Deliveroo, EasyTaxi, Via Taxis to its Fraud Detection Platform
London, October 18: Ravelin, the machine-learning fraud detection company, today announced it has completed a new £3 million round of investment funding to enable it to add to and support its growing client base around the world.
Just nine months after the product was commercially released in January 2016, Ravelin has grown its revenue by over 600% while adding well-known clients including online food delivery company Deliveroo, 10 million rides-a-month taxi app EasyTaxi and US-based taxi service Via Taxi.
Existing investors led by Playfair Capital with participation from Amadeus Capital, Passion Capital, Errol Damelin (founder of Wonga) and Paul Foster (founder of Indeed.com) have all either maintained or expanded their respective stakes in the business.
Martin Sweeney, CEO of Ravelin, said: “We have focused squarely on growing the company by doing a great job for our clients. This investment enables us to continue to grow our team and invest in the infrastructure and technology we need to give the same great experience to even more clients based around the world.”
Nathan Benaich, Partner at Playfair Capital, said: “We are delighted to have led this round. Ravelin has achieved impressive market traction by building fraud detection technology from the ground up to address the ongoing issue of payment fraud. This problem is growing faster than online commerce and Ravelin’s machine learning approach brings the requisite speed, scale and performance to solve it efficiently.”
Robert Dighero, Partner at Passion Capital and board director, added: “The entire team at Ravelin has done a remarkable job of validating the company’s initial proposition and what we found so compelling when we first invested at the seed stage. It’s a pleasure to support this new round of financing which will see the company go from strength to strength.”
Statistics released in July 2016 by the Office for National Statistics demonstrate the severity of the problem for businesses with an estimated 3.8 million incidents of credit and debit card fraud committed in the UK alone during 2015-16. The most recent Nilson Report global figures for 2014-15 put the numbers at $16Bn or 5.65c for every $100 spent.
“We’ve been really impressed with Ravelin’s progress so far,” said Alex van Someren, Managing Partner at Amadeus Capital. “Its success is important not just for the company’s sake but for online commerce itself. Fraud must not continue to grow unchecked and I believe Ravelin’s machine-learning approach is the best option to slow and ultimately reverse that growth.”
Since the first release of the product, Ravelin has been busy adding features and adopting techniques to allow its clients to accept more legitimate orders and refuse those which are suspicious or fraudulent. For instance, Ravelin launched its graph network technology in May which has shut down many thousands of fake accounts and prevented millions of pounds’ worth of potential fraud.
Dan Warne, UK & IE Managing Director from Deliveroo said: “It’s terrific to see Ravelin doing so well and raising such a strong round. It’s really important that as companies like ours build new models of doing business, others such as Ravelin emerge to enable us to focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences. We wish them the best of luck and continued success at addressing this costly issue for all businesses.”
Zalan Lima, CTO of EasyTaxi: “Thanks to Ravelin we are now confident that we can expand the in-app payments part of our business without undue exposure to fraud, which is huge as we are sure this is where the next phase of growth is going to come from for EasyTaxi”.
Links and Resources:
The ONS UK Fraud Survey 2016
Nilson Report
Interview with John Flately, Head of Crime Statistics
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About Ravelin
Ravelin provides real-time fraud detection for online businesses. We analyse customer behaviour and transactions using powerful proprietary data science and machine learning technologies, and work with merchants to provide extremely accurate fraud detection.
Ravelin Timeline
October 2014: Founders leave their former company to start Ravelin
March 2014: Initial seed funding from Passion Capital secured
September 2014: Amadeus Capital, Playfair Capital, Errol Damelin, Paul Forster and Jeremy Miller join Passion Capital in £1.3 million round
January 2016: Ravelin is commercially launched following several paid trials
April 2016: Company introduces graph networks to track fraudulent connections
October 2016: £3 million round of funding announced