Africa’s digital payments scene is booming, but with that growth comes a wave of fraud risks that Western tools just can’t keep up with. Most legacy systems were built for neat data and fixed identities, so they either block legit transactions or let clever fraud slip through, hurting trust and slowing down the whole ecosystem.
Orca Fraud adds smart, adaptive technology directly into payment processes, helping banks, fintechs, and telcos quickly spot fraud without slowing down real transactions. The Cape Town startup recently raised $2.35 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by Norrsken22, with support from OneDayYes, Enza Capital, and CV VC Africa.
This funding will help Orca expand its transaction monitoring across Africa and other emerging markets. The company already handles over $5 billion in payments every month across more than 70 countries.
Fight fraud contextually for each market
Orca was co-founded by Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby, who both saw firsthand that fighting fraud in emerging markets needs local smarts, not copy-paste solutions from the West. Thalia brings deep fintech ops chops, while Carla, a machine learning pro, realised early on that African payment data is messy and nothing like Western datasets.
Orca’s platform connects directly to payment streams like mobile wallets, cards, stablecoins, and bank transfers. It uses machine-learning models trained on real-world emerging-market data to detect fraud across channels in real time. Unlike older tools that check transactions after they happen, Orca makes decisions as payments go through, keeping things fast while catching complex attacks.
What sets Orca apart? It’s built for informal economies where perfect KYC isn’t a given, and it keeps getting smarter as more data flows in. That’s why it outpaces global giants like Feedzai and Nice Actimize, who struggle with Africa’s data gaps and the need for speed.
Compared to other Africa-focused companies like Curacel and Beam, Orca stands out by using real-time intelligence rather than separate verification steps. It also handles large-scale volumes across more than 70 countries without limiting growth.
What’s next?
The new funding will accelerate Orca’s growth by deepening integrations with big banks and telcos, training its models on even more data across Africa, and eyeing expansion into Latin America and Southeast Asia.
Their short-term goals include building faster infrastructure to handle ten times the volume and tackling new fraud types, such as AI-generated account takeovers.
