How Orca Fraud is Scaling Real-Time Fraud Intelligence Across Emerging Markets

Orca Fraud, a real-time fraud intelligence platform, Thalia Pillay, Carla Wilby, and the team, has raised $2.35 million in an oversubscribed seed round 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 see the mix of technical brilliance and mission-driven clarity that Carla and Thalia have built with Orca Fraud,” said Sir John Lazar, General Partner at Enza Capital. “In a mobile-first market, reimagining anti-fraud solutions from the ground up is critical to tackling one of Africa’s most important challenges.”

Orca monitors more than $5 billion in monthly transaction volume across 70+ countries, partnering with banks, telcos, and payment providers across Africa. Its system embeds adaptive intelligence directly into live payment flows, enabling instant, context-aware fraud decisions without slowing legitimate transactions.

“Payments are accelerating while fraud tactics grow more sophisticated,” said Thalia Pillay, Co-founder and CEO of Orca Fraud. “Our mission is to fight fraud with solutions built for each market. Fraud is contextual, risk is situational, and financial systems can only scale when safety evolves alongside growth.”

Many global fraud tools were built for markets with cleaner data and predictable behavior, relying on static identity checks at onboarding. In emerging markets, this often forces trade-offs between blocking legitimate transactions and leaving systems exposed.

Africa’s rapidly digitizing, fragmented landscape allows fraud tactics to evolve quickly, making adaptive, context-aware systems essential to maintain trust and support financial growth.

With mobile wallets and agent banking widespread, a single attack can move quickly across channels, from wallet top-ups to card payments, bank transfers, or stablecoins, before traditional systems detect it. Fraud is increasingly omnichannel, yet many tools still monitor each channel separately.

“African payment data is difficult to access and interpret,” said Carla Wilby, Co-founder and CTO. “It’s fragmented across rails and shaped by economic conditions that Western datasets often miss. We built Orca to embed intelligence directly into live payment flows, allowing our models to learn how money actually moves across the continent.”

As Orca expands across markets, fraud intelligence compounds, and patterns detected in one region help strengthen detection in others. As digital payments grow, the company is focusing on enterprise-grade infrastructure built for high-volume, low-latency environments, ensuring security scales alongside financial growth.