The round was led by Norrsken22 with participation from OneDayYes, Enza Capital and CV VC Africa. The funding follows 16 months of rapid growth for the company, driven by increased demand from banks, fintechs, telcos and payment providers operating in a complex and high-velocity payments environment.
“You rarely come across a combination of technical excellence and mission-driven clarity like what Carla and Thalia have built with Orca Fraud. Fighting fraud in Africa is no longer just a back-end requirement, but fundamental in an increasingly connected world. By fundamentally rethinking anti-fraud solutions for mobile-first markets, this team is solving one of the continent’s most important problems.” Partner Sir John Lazar added:
Founded by Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby, Orca works with leading banks, carriers and payment providers across Africa and currently monitors more than $5 billion in monthly transaction volume in over 70 countries. The company embeds adaptive intelligence directly into the actual payment flow, enabling financial institutions to instantly make contextual fraud decisions without delaying legitimate transactions.
Talia Pillay, co-founder and CEO of Orca Fraud, said: “Our mission is to fight fraud with solutions built for each market, not assumptions borrowed from others. Fraud is context-specific. Risk is context-specific. Financial systems can only scale if safety evolves as they grow.”
Many of the world’s fraud tools are designed for fundamentally different operating environments, including cleaner datasets, more predictable user behavior, and longer feedback cycles. They often assume that static identifiers are sufficient to prevent fraud and rely heavily on verifying identity during onboarding. When expanding into emerging markets, this often forces teams to make trade-offs between growth and control, resulting in large legitimate transactions being blocked or significant risks remaining unresolved.
However, Africa’s fraud situation is unique. It is shaped by the informal economy, rapid digitization and a fragmented regulatory environment. Adversaries evolve faster than static systems can adapt. When financial systems fail to protect users, trust erodes and growth slows.
With mobile wallets becoming mainstream and agent banking becoming mainstream, a single coordinated attack can seamlessly move from a wallet charge to a card transaction, stablecoin transfer, or bank payment before traditional systems trigger an alert. Fraud is increasingly omnichannel, but many tools still monitor each channel individually.
“African payments data is difficult to access and even more difficult to interpret,” said Carla Wilby, co-founder and CTO. “It’s fragmented across rails, informal in structure, and shaped by economic conditions that Western training datasets simply cannot capture. From day one, we built Orca as a global platform, embedding intelligence directly into live payment flows rather than layering in oversight. Over time, we’ve aggregated and learned from this data, developing machine learning models that actually reflect how money moves across the continent.”
As Orca expands across payment systems and geographies, intelligence is compounded across markets, allowing fraud patterns identified in one region to enhance detection in another.
As digital payments accelerate and Orca enters its next phase of growth, there is increased focus on enterprise-grade infrastructure that can support high-capacity, low-latency environments. The mission remains clear and ensuring safety evolves rapidly at scale.
