Darwinium banks $28m for fraud prevention evolution
An Australian digital security and fraud prevention platform backed by US Ventures, Blackbird and Airtree Ventures wants to take on AI-powered scammers.
Online fraud has been present throughout the history of the internet — and it's arguably getting worse. Scams exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, when lockdowns meant many people had nothing to do besides go online. And now the rise of generative artificial intelligence has the potential to turbocharge the problem.
Enter Darwinium, a digital security and fraud prevention platform, which has just raised $28 million in a series A funding round led by US Venture Partners (USVP), with participation from Blackbird, Airtree and high-profile US family office, Accomplice.
The announcement comes at a time of heightened sophistication of online fraud due to the increasing use of AI. CEO and co-founder, Alisdair Faulkner, whose previous cybersecurity company sold for more than $1 billion to LexisNexis Risk Solutions in 2018, says Darwinium’s solution allows companies to detect and act on cyber security threats in real time.
Faulkner says it does this by moving fraud detection processes to the customer’s network perimeter (or ‘to the edge’), which is different to more widely used API-based products that risk-assess ‘moments-in-time’. The technology provides continuous assessment along the customer’s journey to identify high-risk behaviour and machine-generated anomalies.
