Cleafy Secures €12M to Prevent Bank Fraud Proactively
▼ Summary
– Cleafy, a Milan-based cybersecurity firm, has raised €12 million in Series B funding to scale its predictive fraud prevention platform for banks, bringing its total funding to €22 million.
– The company’s platform proactively identifies attack patterns by analyzing combined data streams, aiming to stop fraud weeks before a transaction occurs, unlike reactive, rule-based systems.
– Cleafy currently protects over 250 million users across 150+ financial institutions and reports zero customer churn since its founding in 2014.
– The firm is expanding its product scope with Cleafy for Workforce to detect internal threats and is positioning its platform as foundational for compliance with new EU regulations like DORA and NIS2.
– A key challenge for Cleafy’s next phase is successfully exporting its infrastructure-layer fraud prevention approach from its European base to new markets in Latin America.
In the high-stakes world of digital finance, a proactive stance against fraud is no longer a luxury but a critical necessity. Cleafy, a Milan-based cybersecurity company, has secured €12 million in Series B funding to advance its predictive defense platform for banks. This latest investment, co-led by returning investors United Ventures and eCAPITAL, brings the firm’s total funding to €22 million. The capital infusion will fuel the acceleration of its predictive security capabilities, expand its global threat intelligence network, and support its growth in European and Latin American banking markets.
The company was founded in 2014 by Matteo Bogana, Niccolò Pastore, and Carmine Giangregorio, who shared a common frustration with traditional fraud detection. They observed that conventional tools often work in isolation, analyzing single transactions against fixed rules. This reactive model means that by the time an alert is generated, the stolen funds are frequently irrecoverable. Cleafy was built to dismantle this ineffective approach.
Instead of waiting for a fraudulent transaction, Cleafy’s platform operates on a principle of early interception. It continuously aggregates and analyzes signals from a bank’s entire digital ecosystem, including web, mobile, back-end, and network channels. By fusing this data with live threat intelligence, the system reconstructs the anatomy of an attack as it develops across the institution’s infrastructure. The objective is to pinpoint malicious intent, along with the attacker’s tools and methods, days or even weeks before any transaction is ever flagged as suspicious.
Today, Cleafy’s technology safeguards more than 250 million users across a network of over 150 financial institutions, such as ING, Illimity, and BPS Suisse. The firm highlights its record of zero customer churn as a testament to the platform’s effectiveness, a key point in its discussions with investors. CEO Matteo Bogana emphasizes the growing asymmetry in the cybersecurity battle, noting that while fraudsters increasingly leverage AI to automate and scale their attacks, many banks remain dependent on outdated, reactive systems.
The new funding also coincides with a strategic expansion of the company’s product suite. A newly launched line, Cleafy for Workforce, applies the platform’s predictive logic internally to monitor for insider threats and compromised employee accounts within corporate environments. This move is strategically aligned with evolving European regulations, including the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the updated NIS2 directive, which impose stricter cybersecurity resilience requirements on financial entities. Cleafy positions its platform as foundational infrastructure for achieving compliance, rather than merely an incremental addition to existing security stacks.
Supported by a portfolio of more than 85 international patents, Cleafy’s engine relies on a blend of real-time data and AI-driven analysis. Its team of over 90 professionals operates from offices in Milan, London, Barcelona, and Bogotá. As the company enters this next phase of growth, a central challenge will be proving that its core philosophy, that fraud must be stopped at the infrastructure level, not the transaction level, can achieve the same success in Latin America as it has within Europe.
(Source: The Next Web)
