Fraud is running rampant and getting progressively more sophisticated at permeating global financial networks, and businesses have been forced to increase their investments into stopping it and safeguarding their assets.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, consumers reported losing more than $10 billion to fraud for the first time in 2023, and private data suggests losses continued to grow in 2024. A new survey of 500 banks, credit unions and fintechs by fraud prevention firm Alloy found that around 60% of respondents reported an increase in fraud in 2024, with an additional 20% thinking it stayed around the same.
Alloy, on the Fintech 50 for the third straight year, added 120 clients in 2024, ending the year with 650 customers, including Shopify, Ramp and Marqeta, using its software to improve credit decisions and block fraud attempts. Several of its cybersecurity peers are joining it on the 2005 list after posting strong growth, including repeat appearances from Persona and SentiLink. A newcomer, DataVisor, accelerated its growth last year thanks to its machine learning algorithms which can spot patterns associated with coordinated fraud rings and new, emerging types of scammers.
While AI is certainly providing new avenues for fraudsters to try to evade the roadblocks and reach new victims, automation is of course opening new doors to help businesses operate more efficiently as well. Datasnipper, an Amsterdam-based firm returning to the list for the second year, uses AI-powered technology to snip out information from receipts and bank statements, saving accountants from tedious manual labor combing through expense reports. And Brico, a small firm founded just two years ago and also making its Fintech 50 debut, automates licensing processes to ensure customers are compliant with each state’s distinct regulatory requirements. Brico’s $8 million in seed funding in July valued it at $30 million.
Other notable newcomers providing enterprise software for businesses include procurement startup Zip, which raised a $190 million Series D round in October at a $2.2 billion valuation, marking one of the largest fundraises in another weak year for fintech in 2024. Zip’s software simplifies the process for employees to request supplies and helps businesses track and approve those expenses, and it now has 440 customers, including OpenAI.
Here are the nine Wall Street and Enterprise companies that made this year’s Fintech 50, including other returnees Trumid and Pulley.
Alloy
Headquarters: New York, New York.
Alloy, founded in 2015, offers software with both data sources and fraud prevention tools to help businesses verify identities, with the goal of automating and improving their credit decisions and meeting their know-your-customer and other compliance obligations. Customers include regional banks, credit unions, fintechs LendingClub and Marqeta and e-commerce platform Shopify. In February 2024, it launched a new product that allows banks that sponsor fintechs to monitor their partners’ compliance with anti-money laundering, know-you-customer and other government rules (several banks have faced regulatory enforcement actions for lax oversight of their fintech partners).
Funding: $210 million.
Latest valuation: $1.55 billion.
Date of last valuation: September 2022.
Bona fides: At the end of 2024, Alloy had 650 clients, up from 530 in 2023.
Cofounders: CEO Tommy Nicholas, 36, president Laura Spiekerman, 38, and CTO Charles Hearn, 33.
Brico
Headquarters: San Francisco, California.
Brico’s platform helps fintechs and other nonbank financial players, including lenders, money transmitters and debt collectors, automate the cumbersome state-by-state licensing process and keep up with renewals, reporting requirements and regulatory changes. The startup frames its goals in ambitious terms: It wants to be the TurboTax of state-by-state licensing. While it was only founded in 2023, the company already has 30 customers.
Funding: $8 million from Restive Ventures, Cambrian Ventures, Pear VC and Flourish Ventures, among others.
Latest valuation: $30 million.
Date of last valuation: July 2024.
Bona fides: In less than two years, Brico has landed customers such as Funding Circle, Empower, Bilt and Marqeta.
Cofounders: CEO Snigdha Kumar, 33, former head of product operations at Digit (now Oportun) and CTO Edward Swiac, 35, a software engineer with experience at Marqeta, Twitter and Expedia.
DataSnipper
Headquarters: Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Saves time for auditors and accountants with AI-powered technology that grabs data from receipts and bank statements and matches them with expense reports. It’s used by all of the Big Four accounting firms, and corporate customers pay a subscription fee per user. After raising $100 million in January 2024 at a $1 billion valuation, DataSnipper expanded by opening new offices in Sydney, Tokyo and Mexico City. In October 2024, it acquired Uplink, a secure document collection service that allows auditors to search hundreds of documents at once as they’re uploaded by clients.
Funding: $200 million from Insight Partners and Index Ventures, among others.
Latest valuation: $1 billion.
Date of last valuation: January 2024.
Bona fides: Increased customer count by 56% in 2024 to 1,900 accounting firms.
Cofounders: Jonas Ruyter, 33, Maarten Alblas, 33, and Kai Bakker, 32, started the business in 2017 and bootstrapped it until 2022.
CEO: Vidya Peters, 43, former Marqeta chief operating officer and marketer for Intuit’s Quickbooks; she took over at DataSnipper in 2023.
DataVisor
Headquarters: Mountain View, California.
DataVisor uses patented machine learning algorithms to flag fraudulent payments, wire transfers and loan applications, specializing in detecting connections between users to expose coordinated fraud rings. Its technology flags suspicious transactions in milliseconds, blocking or delaying them from going through and communicating with users in real time. Its platform can analyze 15,000 transactions per second, and its 50 customers include SoFi, Affirm and Marqeta.
Funding: $100 million from Brighton Park Capital, NewView Capital and GSR Ventures, among others.
Latest valuation: $260 million, according to Pitchbook.
Date of last valuation: December 2022.
Bona fides: Increased revenue by 67% in 2024 to $50 million and added 10 new customers.
Cofounders: CEO Yinglian Xie, 48, and chief product officer Fang Yu, 46, both immigrated from China to earn computer science PhDs in the U.S. and worked together at Microsoft for seven years before starting DataVisor in 2013.
Persona
Headquarters: San Francisco, California.
Helps 2,500 enterprise customers, including Robinhood, LinkedIn and Etsy, verify their users’ identities with software products that offer a customizable workflow to assess risk and prevent fraud. In 2024, it enhanced technology to detect AI-based face spoofs for biometric logins and caught 75 million of these fraud attempts. It also released a new service to help customers in Europe onboard businesses and comply with regulatory requirements, and it partnered with Okta to integrate with customers’ broader authentication procedures.
Funding: $218 million from Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Coatue and others.
Latest valuation: $1.5 billion.
Date of last valuation: September 2021.
Bona fides: Processed more than 500 million verifications in 2024, doubling year over year, and increased its customer count by 25%.
Cofounders: CEO Rick Song, 34, and CTO Charles Yeh, 32, former engineers at Square and Dropbox who founded the company as roommates in 2018.
Pulley
Headquarters: San Francisco, California.
Manages private stock ownership cap tables for startups, with plans starting at $1,200 per year for businesses with up to 25 stakeholders. Its fundraising modeling helps founders understand how their stakes will be diluted under complex fundraising structures. Pulley tracks both traditional equity and cryptocurrency ownership stakes and now counts 20 of the top 100 crypto tokens by market cap as customers, including Solana and Sui, with the capability to manage token valuations and distributions. In October 2024, it announced a partnership with Nasdaq Private Market to facilitate stake sales in the secondary market for customers.
Funding: $50 million from Founders Fund, Stripe and YCombinator, among others.
Latest valuation: $250 million.
Date of last valuation: July 2022.
Bona fides: Increased customer count by 83% in 2024 to 7,700 firms.
Cofounders: CEO Yin Wu, 36, who sold a previous startup to Microsoft; chief technology officer Mark Erdmann, 41, a software engineer based in Calgary.
SentiLink
Headquarters: San Francisco, California.
SentiLink’s machine learning models specialize in stopping synthetic identity fraud, when scammers combine fake names with stolen Social Security numbers. Its 350 clients are mostly financial institutions and include 10 of America’s 15 largest banks, and it’s expanding further into sectors like telecommunications and tenant screening. SentiLink verifies 1.5 million identities a day and blocks 30,000 fraud attempts, it says, calculating an identity theft score and synthetic fraud score on a scale from zero to 1,000. It also developed a solution in 2024 to detect an emerging type of identity theft called assumed identity abuse, when fraudsters exploit real identities of people who entered the U.S. using temporary visas and are no longer in the country.
Funding: $85 million from Craft Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and others.
Latest valuation: $430 million, according to PitchBook.
Date of last valuation: July 2021.
Bona fides: SentiLink processes 50% more identity checks a day than a year ago and added 50 customers in 2024.
Cofounders: CEO Naftali Harris, 32, and COO Maxwell Blumenfeld, 33, met as University of Chicago undergrads and were coworkers at Affirm before starting SentiLink in 2017.
Trumid
Headquarters: New York, New York.
Corporate debt trading platform that executes large-scale bond trades of investment-grade, high-yield, distressed and emerging market bonds for users at 920 financial institutions. Average daily trading volume was at least $5 billion in every month of 2024 except December (typically a slow month around the holidays). More than 16,000 unique bonds traded on the platform in 2024, and 2,200 traders made transactions, both of which were record highs for the company. It launched an automated trading product in May 2024 called Trumid AutoPilot that allows traders to set predetermined parameters to make trades automatically.
Funding: $650 million from Point Break, Motive Partners, Dragoneer and others.
Latest valuation: $2.4 billion.
Date of last valuation: October 2021.
Bona fides: Total transaction volume in 2024 was $1.4 trillion, growing 62% year-over-year.
Founder: Co-CEO Ronnie Mateo, 51, previously a bond trader at Trinity Brokers; Co-CEO Mike Sobel, 45, joined Trumid from Barclays in 2014 as president and was promoted in 2021.
Zip
Headquarters: San Francisco, California.
Procurement, the process companies go through to buy goods and services to run their businesses, has become increasingly decentralized and complex over the past decade, and ever-growing fraud has made it fraught with risk. Zip’s software organizes and orchestrates procurement processes and approvals, visualizing the steps needed to complete a purchase. Zip also processes the payments–the startup says it processed more than $10 billion in 2024. Just four years after its founding, Zip reached a $2.2 billion valuation.
Funding: $371 million from Bond, CRV and Y Combinator, among others.
Latest valuation: $2.2 billion.
Date of last valuation: October 2024.
Bona fides: Had 440 customers at the end of 2024, including OpenAI, Prudential, Snowflake and DollarTree, up from 290 the year prior.
Cofounders: CEO Rujul Zaparde, 30, cofounded car-rental startup FlightCar before becoming a product manager at Airbnb in 2017. There he met Lu Cheng, 32, an Airbnb engineering manager, who is now Zip’s CTO. The pair left Airbnb to cofound Zip in 2020.
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