Fraud Prevention Firm SEON Raises $94M

British-Hungarian online fraud prevention firm SEON has raised $94 million in Series B funding, the company said in a news release Tuesday (April 19).

SEON said the funding, arriving a year after its Series A round, will be used to boost its presence in North America, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region. In addition, the company hopes to build partnerships with eCommerce platforms, “heighten product functionality, and integrate additional data sources to help customers better fight fraud.”

The London-based company said it saw major growth last year, becoming “the go-to fraud prevention solution” for companies like Revolut, NuBank, Afterpay and Patreon. It also tripled its annual recurring revenue and opened new offices in Austin, Texas, and Jakarta, Indonesia.

“As the pandemic accelerated consumer activity and transactions online, identity fraud has grown exponentially,” SEON said in the release. “Bad actors are becoming increasingly sophisticated and companies need better tools to fight back.”

In the past, effective anti-fraud measures were only accessible to larger enterprises with the resources to handle complicated implementations, SEON said, adding that it “democratizes access to fraud-fighting technology.”

The company also said its platform uses machine learning capabilities to help businesses teams set rules, weed out false accounts and spot fraud in real time. SEON can verify users with zero friction, helping businesses save money and fully complement their know your customer (KYC) and ID verification checks.

This news comes at a time when just 32% of businesses say they are “very” or “extremely” satisfied with their anti-fraud tools.

See also: Only One-Third of Businesses Are ‘Very Satisfied’ With Their Current Cybersecurity Defenses

That’s according to “Risk And Resilience,” a PYMNTS and TreviPay report based on interviews with 150 executives at firms with $10 million to $1 billion in annual revenues.

Another 41% of companies said they were “moderately” satisfied with their digital identity verification and fraud prevention methods, while 27% reported being “slightly” or “not at all” satisfied. In addition, businesses reported being much more satisfied with automated anti-fraud solutions than with manual tools.

In fact, nearly half of companies using digital fraud solutions that are proactive and automated are “very” or “extremely” satisfied, versus just 17% of those with solutions that are proactive and manual, the report found.