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.
“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.
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. “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.
