A new investment of $20 million takes the total capital raised by behavioral biometrics innovator BioCatch to more than $213 million. Participating in this week’s funding were a quartet of major global banks: Barclays, Citi, HSBC, and National Australia Bank (NAB). The funds add to BioCatch’s Series C round, which brought $145 million to the company’s coffers in April.
In addition to its funding announcement, BioCatch also unveiled a new BioCatch Client Innovation Board. The Board is a collaborative, invitation-only forum where members can discuss and develop new approaches to leveraging what the company called in a statement “the unique attributes of behavior.” BioCatch’s signature innovation in behavioral biometrics is a cognitive behavioral approach that focuses on the way a user interacts with their device, as well as online and mobile applications in order to combat fraud. The company’s Invisible Challenges mechanism operates without the user even being aware of it, enabling BioCatch to provide strong authentication with minimal friction for the user.
As part of the funding, each of this week’s investing banks, as will existing BioCatch investor, American Express Ventures, will have two seats on the Innovation Board.
“We have already seen the power of collaboration in solving difficult problems in other areas of the financial services industry, such as clearing corps, transaction networks, post-trade processing, margin calculation, and collateral management, when banks work together and share knowledge, workflow, and data in the common interest,” Edelstein said. “We are extremely excited that five of the largest and most important global financial institutions are working with BioCatch to jointly address today’s most pressing problems in the areas of online fraud, account authentication and digital identity.”
Founded in 2011 and based in both New York City and Israel, BioCatch was named to CB Insights’ Fintech 250 list of the fastest-growing fintechs earlier this month. Over the summer, the company announced that it had created anonymous behavioral profiles for more than 150 million individual online banking users, and now analyzes more than one billion digital sessions a month in real-time.
