South African fintech company Orca has successfully raised $2.35 million in an oversubscribed seed round to scale its fraud detection platform, specifically designed for Africa’s mobile-first payments systems.
Norrsken22 led the round, which was joined by OneDayyes, Enza Capital and CV VC Africa. The funding will help Orca enhance engineering capabilities and expand into emerging markets where traditional Western fraud tools struggle to keep pace with mobile wallets, agent banking and rapidly evolving fraud tactics.
Founded by Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby, both former Stitch engineers, orca It now tracks over $5 billion of monthly transaction volume in over 70 countries.
The company works with major banks, telecoms companies and payment providers across Africa, embedding fraud intelligence directly into live payment flows.
Why do global fraud tools fail in Africa?
Many fraud detection systems were created for different markets with clean data, predictable user behavior and long response times. These systems rely heavily on verifying identity during onboarding and assume that static identifiers are sufficient to prevent fraud.
When used in Africa, these tools put companies in a difficult position: they must either block many legitimate transactions or risk leaving themselves open to massive fraud.
“Payments are becoming faster, and fraud tactics are becoming more sophisticated,” Pillay said. “Our mission is to fight fraud with solutions built for each market, not with concepts borrowed from elsewhere. Fraud is contextual. Risk is situational.”
Africa's fraud landscape is unique. There are informal economies, rapid digital development and different regulations in different places. A single coordinated attack can easily move from topping up a mobile wallet, to card transactions, stablecoin transfers or bank payments, before traditional systems can even notice it.
Read like this: NjiaPay raises $2.1M seed funding to simplify merchant payments across Africa
“Fraud is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, yet many tools still monitor each channel separately,” The puppy added.
Orca is building intelligence from Africa's payments data
Orca collects and learns from real payments data in Africa. They create machine learning models that show how money moves across the continent.
“African payments data is difficult to access and even more difficult to interpret,said Carla Wilby, co-founder and CTO of Orca. “It is fragmented across lines, informal in structure, and shaped by economic conditions that Western training datasets do not easily capture.”
From the beginning, the company built a global platform that incorporates intelligence into real-time payment processes. This helps Orca quickly make smart decisions about fraud while keeping legitimate transactions flowing.
As Orca expands into new payment systems and sectors, it draws on knowledge gained from different markets. Fraud patterns identified in one area help improve detection in another area.
Orca has raised $2.35 million after 16 months of accelerated growth led by increasing demand from financial institutions. The company aims to build the infrastructure for high-volume, low-latency digital payment systems as its adoption grows across Africa.