Orca Fraud Raises $2.35m to Scale Real-Time Fraud Intelligence Across Emerging Markets

Orca Fraud, a real-time fraud intelligence platform, has raised $2.35 million in an oversubscribed seed round to advance its transaction monitoring and fraud intelligence capabilities across Africa and other emerging markets.

The round was led by Norrsken22, with participation from OneDayYes, Enza Capital, and CV VC Africa. The funding follows 16 months of rapid enterprise growth driven by increasing demand from banks, fintechs, telcos and payment providers operating in complex, high-velocity payment environments.

Sir John Lazar, General Partner at Enza Capital, said, “Rarely do you encounter a combination of technical brilliance and mission-driven clarity than what Carla and Thalia have built in Orca Fraud. Combatting fraud in Africa is no longer just a backend requirement; it is fundamental in an increasingly connected world. By reimagining anti-fraud solutions from the ground up, for a mobile first market, this team is solving one of the most meaningful problems of our continent” 

Founded by Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby, Orca now monitors more than $5 billion in monthly transaction volume across over 70 countries, working with major banks, telcos and payment providers across Africa. The company embeds adaptive intelligence directly into live payment flows, enabling financial institutions to make instant, context-aware fraud decisions without slowing legitimate transactions.

“Payments are moving faster, and fraud tactics are becoming more sophisticated,” said Thalia Pillay, Co-founder and CEO of Orca Fraud. “Our mission is to fight fraud with solutions built for each market, not assumptions borrowed from elsewhere. Fraud is contextual. Risk is situational. Financial systems can only scale when safety evolves alongside growth.”

Many global fraud tools were designed for fundamentally different operating environments—cleaner datasets, more predictable user behaviour, and longer feedback cycles. They often rely heavily on identity verification at onboarding, assuming static identifiers are sufficient to prevent fraud. When deployed in emerging markets, this often forces teams into trade-offs between growth and control,  either blocking legitimate transactions at scale or leaving material exposure unaddressed.

Africa’s fraud landscape, however, is distinct. Informal economies, rapid digitisation, and fragmented regulatory environments shape it. Adversaries evolve faster than static systems can adapt. When financial systems fail to protect users, trust erodes and growth slows.

With mobile wallets dominant and agent banking mainstream, a single coordinated attack can seamlessly move from a wallet top-up to a card transaction, a stablecoin transfer, or a bank payment before traditional systems trigger an alert. Fraud is increasingly omnichannel—yet many tools still monitor each channel in isolation. 

“African payment data is hard to access and even harder to interpret,” said Carla Wilby, Co-founder and CTO of Orca Fraud “It is fragmented across rails, informal in structure, and shaped by economic conditions that Western training datasets simply don’t capture. We built Orca as a global platform from day one, embedding intelligence directly into live payment flows rather than layering monitoring on top. Over time, we’ve aggregated and learned from this data, developing machine learning models that reflect how money actually moves across the continent.”

Intelligence compounds across markets, allowing fraud patterns identified in one geography to strengthen detection in another as Orca expands across payment systems and regions.

As digital payments accelerate and Orca enters its next phase of growth, the focus is sharpening on enterprise-grade infrastructure capable of supporting high-volume, low-latency environments. Its mission remains clear: ensuring safety evolves as quickly as scale. 

Nivesh Pather, Principal at Norrsken22, added, “Since our initial investment, Orca has evolved into critical infrastructure that enterprises increasingly rely on to manage fraud in high-velocity payment systems. As digital payments accelerate and fraud becomes more organised and technology-driven, institutions need intelligence embedded directly into transaction flows to protect customers without slowing payments. What stands out about Orca is how quickly the team translated deep domain expertise into an enterprise-grade platform capable of operating across markets, payment ecosystems, and fraud typologies. The level of enterprise demand we’re seeing reflects a structural shift in how fraud prevention needs to be built,”

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