Machine learning fraud detection company, Ravelin, completed a new £3 million round of investment funding to expand and serve more customers. The company already serves the likes of Deliveroo, EasyTaxi, and Via Taxis in detecting fraud.
Just nine months after the product was commercially released, Ravelin has grown its revenue by over 600 per cent.
Existing investors led by Playfair Capital with participation from Amadeus Capital, Passion Capital, Wonga founder Errol Damelin and Indeed.com founder Paul Foster have all either maintained or expanded their respective stakes in the business.
Ravelin CEO Martin Sweeney focused squarely on growing the company in the first few months, tackling the issue of payment fraud by analysing both the order data and user behaviour together.
According to Nathan Benaich, partner at Playfair Capital, Ravelin has achieved impressive market traction by building fraud detection technology from the ground up, which has led to its rapid growth. “(Payment fraud) is growing faster than online commerce and Ravelin’s machine learning approach brings the requisite speed, scale and performance to solve it efficiently.”
Figures released in July 2016 by the Office for National Statistics demonstrate the severity of the problem for businesses with an estimated 3.8 million incidents of credit and debit card fraud committed in the UK alone during 2015-16.
“We’ve been really impressed with Ravelin’s progress so far,” said Alex van Someren, managing partner at Amadeus Capital. “Its success is important not just for the company’s sake but for online commerce as a whole. Fraud must not continue to grow unchecked, and I believe Ravelin’s machine-learning approach is the best option to slow and ultimately reverse that growth.”
Since the first release of the product, Ravelin has been adding features and adopting techniques to allow its clients to accept more legitimate orders and refuse those which are suspicious or fraudulent. As an example, Ravelin launched its graph network technology in May which has shut down many thousands of fake accounts and prevented millions of pounds worth of potential fraud.
