South African anti-fraud startup, Orca raises $2.35M to enhance fraud detection

South African fintech company Orca has successfully raised $2.35 million in an oversubscribed seed round to enhance its fraud detection platform, which is specifically designed for Africa’s mobile-first payment systems.

Norrsken22 led the round, with OneDayYes, Enza Capital, and CV VC Africa participating. The funding will help Orca scale engineering capabilities and expand across emerging markets where traditional Western fraud tools struggle to keep up with mobile wallets, agent banking, and rapidly evolving fraud tactics.

Founded by Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby, both former Stitch engineers, Orca now monitors over $5 billion in monthly transaction volume across more than 70 countries.

The company works with major banks, telcos, and payment providers across Africa, embedding fraud intelligence directly into live payment flows.

Orca Founders, Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby

Why global fraud tools fail in Africa

Many fraud detection systems were created for different markets with cleaner data, predictable user behavior, and longer feedback periods. These systems depend heavily on verifying identities during onboarding and assume that static identifiers are enough to stop fraud.

When used in Africa, these tools put companies in a tough spot: they must either block many legitimate transactions or risk leaving themselves open to huge fraud.

“Payments are moving faster, and fraud tactics are becoming more sophisticated,” Pillay said. “Our mission is to fight fraud with solutions built for each market, not assumptions borrowed from elsewhere. Fraud is contextual. Risk is situational.”

Africa’s fraud landscape is unique. It has informal economies, fast digital growth, and different rules in various places. A single coordinated attack can easily move from topping up a mobile wallet to a card transaction, a stablecoin transfer, or a bank payment before traditional systems even notice it.

Similar read: NjiaPay raises $2.1M seed funding to simplify merchant payments across Africa

“Fraud is increasingly omnichannel, yet many tools still monitor each channel in isolation,” Pillay added.

Orca is building intelligence from Africa’s payment data

Orca gathers and learns from real payment data in Africa. They create machine learning models that show how money moves across the continent.

“African payment data is hard to access and even harder to interpret,” Carla Wilby, Orca’s co-founder and CTO, said. “It is fragmented across rails, informal in structure, and shaped by economic conditions that Western training datasets simply don’t capture.”

From the start, the company created a global platform that includes intelligence in real-time payment processes. This helps Orca quickly make smart decisions about fraud while keeping legitimate transactions running smoothly.

As Orca expands into new payment systems and regions, it uses knowledge gained from different markets. Patterns of fraud recognized in one area help improve detection in another.n in another.

Orca has raised $2.35 million after 16 months of quick growth due to increased demand from financial institutions. The company aims to build infrastructure for high-volume, low-latency digital payment systems as adoption increases across Africa.

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