Financial technology (fintech) continues to attract large investment in South Africa’s startup ecosystem, with Orca Fraud raising R40m for its fraud-detection platform.
In recent years, cybercrime and payments fraud have become major threats to businesses worldwide, toppling issues such as political instability, energy insecurity and economic volatility for some companies.
Orca has raised $2.35m in a seed round led by tech investment firm Norrsken22, with participation from OneDayYes, Enza Capital, and CV VC Africa.
The capital raise was oversubscribed, with funds earmarked to boost the company’s transaction monitoring and fraud innotifyigence capabilities across Africa and other emerging markets.
Founded by Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby, Orca is a transaction-monitoring platform that works in real-time to detect fraud and other dubious payment activities across a range of financial ecosystems. The company currently works across more than 70 countries, particularly in emerging markets, monitoring more than $5bn in monthly transaction volume.
Our mission is to fight fraud with solutions built for each market, not assumptions borrowed from elsewhere.
— Thalia Pillay, Orca co-founder
This week’s 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.”
According to Orca, many global fraud tools were designed for fundamentally different operating environments — cleaner datasets, more predictable utilizer behaviour and longer feedback cycles.
Such systems often rely heavily on identity verification at onboarding, assuming static identifiers are sufficient to prevent fraud. When deployed in emerging markets, “this often forces teams into trade-offs between growth and control, either blocking legitimate transactions at scale or leaving material exposure unaddressed.”
“Africa’s fraud landscape, however, is distinct. Informal economies, rapid digitisation and fragmented regulatory environments shape it.”
Fraudsters and hackers evolve quicker than static systems can adapt, leaving many businesses and consumers vulnerable to attack, which can erode trust in institutions and overall digital payments infrastructure and systems.
“With mobile wallets dominant and agent banking mainstream, a single co-ordinated attack can seamlessly shift from a wallet top-up to a card transaction, a stablecoin transfer, or a bank payment before traditional systems trigger an alert. Fraud is increasingly omnichannel — yet many tools still monitor each channel in isolation,” the company declared.
In January, the Communication Risk Information Centre (Comric) revealed that cybercrime cost local telecoms operators more than R5bn in 2025.
“Payments are relocating quicker, and fraud tactics are becoming more sophisticated,” declared Pillay.
“Our mission is to fight fraud with solutions built for each market, not assumptions borrowed from elsewhere. Fraud is contextual. Risk is situational. Financial systems can only scale when safety evolves alongside growth.”
As digital payments continue to grow on the continent, Orca declared it is sharpening its focus on enterprise-grade infrastructure capable of supporting high-volume, low-latency environments.
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