Ravelin raises more than £1.3M in funding to protect online businesses from fraud

Barclays Techstars Fintech alumnus secures funding from leading VCs and angel investors to fund expansion of team in support of fast-growing customer base.

London, UK 29 September 2015: Ravelin is a smarter fraud detection and prevention platform for businesses that need to make accurate payment fraud decisions quickly. Leading UK technology VCs Amadeus Capital Partners, Playfair Capital and Passion Capital invested from the institutional side. They were joined by angel investors Errol Damelin (Wonga founder), Paul Forster (Indeed.com founder), Gigi Levy (ex-CEO of 888 Holdings and investor in Kenshoo) and Jeremy Millar (Partner at Magister Advisors). The round follows on from Passion’s initial seed round in February 2015.

“We started Ravelin with the insight that the on-demand economy was poorly served when it comes combatting fraud” said Martin Sweeney, CEO at Ravelin. “We’re delighted with the market reception to our private beta, and this funding round from such prestigious investors is further validation of our original insight.”

“Ravelin’s team has developed first-class technology to address the growing problem of online payment fraud, harnessing the power of Machine Learning to score transaction reliability in real time. This addresses a large and very important market opportunity.” said Alex van Someren, Managing Partner of Amadeus’ Early Stage funds, and co-founder of Europe’s first cybersecurity accelerator Cyber London. “Online fraud has the potential to restrict the growth of on-demand companies, but Ravelin’s technology will enable them to trade with confidence.”

Funding to expand the team, operations and customer base

Ravelin has significantly grown its technical team over the last six months, thereby accelerating product development and new beta partnerships. The new funding will allow it to grow even further, to attract new and support existing customers, as well as expand the company’s machine learning, signals intelligence and partnership capabilities.

About Ravelin

Ravelin provides fraud detection for the on-demand economy. We analyse customer behaviour and transactions using powerful proprietary data science and machine learning technologies, and work closely with merchants to provide extremely accurate fraud detection scores - read more about this here. Information and decisions are instant, allowing payments to be accepted with confidence at the speed needed to build a dynamic business. Merchants can focus on growing the business confident that Ravelin is protecting them from fraud risk.

About Playfair Capital

Playfair Capital is an early stage investment fund founded in 2011 by Federico Pirzio-Biroli. Our ethos is to find and back trailblazers who are bold enough to build technology that generates a quantum leap in the way people live and work for the better, such as We partner closely with our entrepreneurs to provide them with the financial, operational, and strategic support required to bring their visionary technologies to the world. Since our inception, Playfair has backed over 35 companies across the UK, Europe, the US, and Africa including DueDil, Appear Here, Mapillary and Gluru. For further information, please visit www.playfaircapital.com

About Amadeus

Amadeus Capital Partners is a leading technology investor. Since its inception in 1997 the firm has raised over $1bn for investment and backed more than 100 companies in the software, mobile, internet, cyber security and medical technology sectors. The investment team is global (UK, Sweden, USA, India and South Africa), has deep experience in technology and invests in high-growth companies at all stages of development, from seed and early stage to pre-IPO.

Major businesses built by Amadeus include CSR (LSE:CSR), a connectivity, audio, imaging and location semiconductor company; Solexa, the developer of next generation genetic analysis systems, merged into Illumina (ILMN) to create the world leader in gene-sequencing technology, Octo Telematics, the global leader in insurance telematics services acquired by Renova Group; and Transmode (ST:TRMO), an optical networking solutions business.For more information, please visit http://www.amadeuscapital.com

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