Ex-Rocket Scientists at Feedzai Protecting the World’s Financial Institutions from Fraud and Financial Crime

Feedzai, a fintech company on a mission to make the world a safer place for commerce, one transaction at a time, led by Nuno Sebastião, Pedro Bizarro, Pedro Barata, Riccardo Brizzi, Julie O’Brien, and others, has secured approximately $75 million from Lince Capital, Iberis Capital, and Explorer Investments, alongside renewed backing from Oxy Capital and Buenavista Equity Partners, valuing the company at $2 Billion. The European Central Bank (ECB) has concluded a framework agreement in ranking with Feedzai as the first-ranked tenderer, to provide the central fraud detection and prevention mechanism for the digital euro.

Representing 440 million citizens and $17 trillion in GDP, the eurozone is set to introduce the digital euro, the most significant monetary innovation in Europe since 1999. Feedzai, alongside PwC, will deliver its risk and fraud management component, implementing a state-of-the-art fraud detection system fully compliant with EU security and privacy standards. Final development and rollout will be coordinated with the ECB, ensuring a secure and reliable Digital Euro Service Platform.

The ECB is designing the digital euro as a public good, a central bank-backed currency as reliable as cash but built for the digital age. Key goals include preserving central bank money in a digital world, reducing reliance on non-EU payment providers, and supporting financial inclusion. Privacy is central, with strong safeguards like pseudonymisation and encryption, along with offline, cash-like payments for small transactions.

Feedzai has been selected as the top tenderer to deliver the central fraud detection and prevention system for the future digital euro. The platform enhances payment service providers’ risk management by providing transaction-level fraud risk scores for both peer-to-peer (P2P) and peer-to-merchant (P2M) payments, helping PSPs decide whether to approve or block a transaction.

Feedzai safeguards over $70 billion in annualized payment volume across card transactions and bill payments. Recent achievements include launching Feedzai Orchestration and Feedzai IQ™ to enable faster, smarter risk decisions, preventing over $2B in losses while saving 20M+ analyst hours, and advancing responsible AI through the TRUST Framework for fairness, explainability, and security. Its AI-native RiskOps platform unifies fragmented systems into a single financial crime prevention stack, supporting fraud, risk, and AML operations for global institutions.