Orca Fraud has raised $2.35 million in seed funding to advance its real-time transaction monitoring and fraud intelligence capabilities across Africa and other emerging markets.
The round was led by returning investor Norrsken22, with participation from OneDayYes, Enza Capital, and CV VC Africa.
Founded by Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby, the company has grown to process over $5 billion in monthly transaction volume across more than 70 countries, working with major banks, telcos and payment providers across Africa. The duo raised their oversubscribed seed round after 16 months, driven by rapidly growing enterprise demand.
“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,” said Nivesh Pather, Principal at Norrsken22.
Financial inclusion requires financial safety
Fraud is a structural pressure that innovates as technology does. In emerging markets, it is shaped by informal economies, rapid digitisation, fragmented regulation, and adversaries who adapt faster than static systems can respond. But when financial systems cannot protect themselves and their users, trust erodes and growth slows.
In Africa, the fraud surface is also fundamentally different. Mobile wallets dominate. Agent banking is mainstream. A single attack can span a mobile wallet top-up, a card transaction, a stablecoin or bank transfer before most systems have fired a single alert — omnichannel by nature, and invisible to tools that monitor channels in isolation.
Most global fraud tools were designed for very different conditions: cleaner datasets, more predictable behaviour, and longer feedback loops. Many also over-index on identity checks at onboarding, assuming static identifiers can carry the full weight of fraud prevention.
When deployed in emerging markets, they often force teams into trade-offs between growth and control, either blocking legitimate transactions at scale or leaving material exposure unaddressed.
It’s why one of the largest telcos in Africa, one of the largest PSPs, and one of the largest financial services groups runs Orca across its full transaction stack: monitoring fraud in real time across a user base of 6 million customers on multiple payment rails, simultaneously, with no room for error.
Built global from day one. Engineered for the world’s most complex fraud.
Orca was built in African payment environments where merchant networks evolve quickly and transaction behaviour does not conform to global averages. That reality shaped its approach: embedding intelligence directly into live payment flows rather than layering monitoring on top.
African payment data is hard to get and harder to interpret: fragmented across rails, informal in structure, and shaped by economic conditions that Western training sets simply don’t capture. Orca has spent years aggregating and learning from this data, building ML models that reflect how money actually moves across the continent.
Critically, intelligence compounds across markets. Fraud patterns detected in Nigeria inform detection in Kenya. Emerging typologies in South Africa surface earlier in Ghana. Each market Orca operates in strengthens every other — creating a network effect that purpose-built, single-market tools can never replicate. This is what it means to be built global from day one. Today, Orca fuels fraud and AML intelligence across more than 75 countries, bringing together global insights in a comprehensive emerging market offering that extends from the M-Pesa wallet in Nairobi to the crypto wallet in Bangkok to the Pix Wallet in Rio de Janeiro.
As Orca enters its next phase, the focus sharpens on enterprise-grade infrastructure.
Orca embeds adaptive intelligence directly into live payment flows — evaluating behaviour across markets in real time and improving decision quality as fraud evolves. The result is faster, more defensible risk decisions without sacrificing approval rates or customer experience.
“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,” added Sir John Lazar, General Partner at Enza Capital.
“Orca remains a small team by design — tight, technical, and deeply embedded with clients. As we scale across emerging markets and payment systems, our focus remains clear: ensuring safety keeps pace with scale,” ends Pillay.
