Daniel Loftus at an LEO award ceremony. Image: Local Enterprise Office
CEO and founder Daniel Loftus said that the seed funding will help UrbanFox prevent businesses from falling victim to online synthetic fraud.
UrbanFox, an Irish fraud prevention tech start-up, has raised €3.5m in seed funding to grow its team and expand its customer base in the aviation and retail sectors.
Founded initially as a customer analytics tool, Dublin-based UrbanFox is today focused on reducing online payment fraud.
“Over the last five years, the rate at which fraud has grown has continued to increase. It is affecting more retailers and more customers than ever before,” said UrbanFox CEO and founder Daniel Loftus.
“Fraudsters are getting smarter, they are better funded and far more sophisticated than in years past. Current fraud detection solutions are no longer up to the task.”
UrbanFox uses generative artificial intelligence to detect fraud by building technology that ‘thinks’ like a fraudster and mimics their behaviour. This method is intended to replace current conventions of rules-based fraud detection, such as IP address scanning or enabling a captcha.
The result is increased protection for businesses from the growing incidence of online synthetic fraud – in which criminals copy aspects of a customer’s identity, behaviour and compromised financial information to form multiple synthetic identities to purchase goods or digital assets.
“Essentially, what UrbanFox is able to do is simulate what it thinks the behaviours of these fraudsters are and then it compares them to what’s happening in real time, allowing us to detect fraudsters before they actually commit a crime,” Loftus told SiliconRepublic.com in 2019.
The latest funding round was led by MiddleGame Ventures and JetBlue Ventures, with participation from Furthr VC, IAG Capital Partners, Forward VC, WxNW and Twilightford. Several US and Irish-based angels also took part in the seed round.
“We first met Dan over two years ago and are excited to now partner with him as UrbanFox goes live with an impressive roster of early adopters,” said MiddleGame Ventures general partner and co-founder Patrick Pinschmidt.
UrbanFox’s technology can be applied to e-commerce, digital purchases and payment processing. The company has recently signed a deal with an unnamed major airline.
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