South African fintech startup Orca has raised a $2.35 million seed round to expand its fraud-prevention platform for payment systems in emerging markets.
The deal stands out within the region’s venture landscape as one of the largest seed rounds secured by an all-female founding team.
The round was led by Norrsken22, which had previously backed the company’s $550,000 pre-seed raise earlier in 2024. Additional investors include One Day Yes, Enza Capital, and CV VC Africa.
Orca’s emergence comes as financial inclusion continues to reshape payment behavior across Africa. Mobile wallets, agent banking, and merchant payment networks have widened access to digital finance, though the rapid shift has also expanded the attack surface for fraud and cybercrime.
Data cited from Interpol placed South Africa among the most targeted countries globally for cyberattacks, while figures from the Southern African Fraud Prevention Service show fraud incidents rising sharply over the past several years.
Many financial institutions across the continent still rely on compliance and fraud detection systems designed for card-based payment markets in Europe and North America.
Those systems often struggle to interpret risk signals from mobile wallets, USSD payments, agent-driven transactions, and other payment channels that dominate much of Africa’s financial infrastructure.
The gap has created room for locally designed platforms that can analyze patterns unique to these systems.
Founded in January 2024 by former Stitch engineers Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby, Orca focuses on developing fraud-detection tools tailored to alternative payment methods common in emerging markets.
Pillay previously worked at Investec and agri-tech firm Aerobotics, while Wilby earlier launched the education technology platform Zomila.
The pair developed Orca’s platform after speaking with more than 200 fraud and compliance teams across regional financial institutions, using those conversations to identify weaknesses in existing security systems.
Eighteen months after launch, the company reports that its infrastructure monitors between $4 billion and $5 billion in monthly transaction volume across more than 70 countries. Its customers include telecommunications providers, large merchants, and banks that operate across multiple payment channels.
The funding milestone also highlights the persistent gender imbalance within Africa’s venture ecosystem. Female-only founding teams historically capture a small fraction of institutional investment, with industry data showing that they received roughly one percent of venture funding across the continent between 2019 and 2022.
Orca’s raise therefore reflects both investor confidence in fraud infrastructure and a rare shift in capital allocation patterns.
Despite still having a portion of its pre-seed funding available, the company chose to accelerate its seed round following stronger-than-expected demand from enterprise clients.
The new capital will support expansion of its engineering team, further development of fraud detection models suited to regional payment patterns, and continued growth into additional markets where mobile-first financial systems dominate transaction flows.