16 November 2023, London, Madrid, San Francisco.- Lynx, a leading provider of AI software that detects and prevents fraud and financial crimes, today announces a €17 million (c.£15 million) Series A funding round led by Forgepoint Capital, a leading venture capital firm focused on cybersecurity and digital infrastructure software, with the participation of Banco Santander, a Lynx shareholder. Forgepoint Managing Director Leo Casusol will join Lynx’s Board of Directors.
Digital fraud is the fastest-growing type of fraud. Cumulative merchant losses to online payment fraud globally between 2023 and 2027 will exceed USD$343 billion. Financial institutions are spending upwards of $206 billion globally on financial crime compliance. The UN Office of Drugs and Crime estimates the total amount of money laundered globally to be 2% to 5% of global annual GDP (approximately $800 billion to $2 trillion), most of which goes to fund the drug trade, people trafficking, and even terrorism. Money laundering is estimated to cost the UK economy more than £100 billion each year, with UK financial institutions spending upwards of £34.2 billion per year on financial crime compliance.
Created 20 years ago by Dr. Carlos Santa Cruz, a computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert who now serves as Chief Technology Officer, Lynx applies advanced AI and machine learning to prevent digital fraud and combat money laundering by predicting and detecting behavioural patterns and delivering risk scores in real time and at enterprise scale. After two decades of co-development with select commercial clients, Lynx also announces the appointment of new CEO, industry leader Dan Dica, who will leverage his extensive experience growing successful software companies to help the company scale.
Today, Lynx is helping leading financial institutions across Europe, the UK, the US and Latin America, including Cielo, the largest credit and debit card operator in Brazil, and Banco Santander. With models trained and validated on the 58 billion transactions by 300 million bank customers per year that Lynx protects, the company offers fraud prevention for cards, digital banking, ecommerce, telephony, branches and ATMs.
Lynx uses insights from its fraud prevention, anti-money laundering (AML) and cybersecurity risk identification capabilities to continually enhance its models. Its ‘Daily Adaptive Model’, a first-of-its-kind proprietary capability, continually learns new behaviours and retrains models daily, ensuring its AI models are drift-resistant. Lynx can process enterprise-level transaction volumes and generate fraud scores three times more accurate than current industry standards in under 15 milliseconds. With Lynx, consumers can transact safely and securely without delay and financial institutions contend with far fewer false positives than competing solutions.
The investment will fund Lynx’s global expansion and further the development of the company’s integrated fraud and AML platform that will provide 360-degree visibility of risk and generate significant operational efficiencies, informed by market and regulatory drivers, client needs and technological advancements.
Dan Dica, Chief Executive Officer, Lynx, comments: “I am privileged to be working with Carlos and our extraordinary and passionate team, forward-looking clients, and supportive investors and Board who recognize the power of the Lynx platform and the critical problems we are out to solve. Together, we will continue to advance our platform capabilities to better serve our clients across the globe in the enduring fight against fraud and financial crime.”
Julio Bento, Senior Manager of Fraud Prevention and AML at Cielo, says: “We are one of the leading payment processing companies in Latin America, with more than 1 million customers across Brazil and we chose Lynx due to its advanced AI and performance in predicting and identifying fraud. At Cielo, we process large quantities of transactions, so speed is essential. We found Lynx to be the fastest, with the highest accuracy and the fewest false positives. We are impressed by Lynx’ continuous innovation in the field of AI, automatic machine learning models being one example. Models can learn customer behavior and provide our customers with a great experience, enabling genuine transactions to flow while identifying fraud in real time. Over the years, Lynx has been and continues to be a trusted and reliable technology partner.”
Forgepoint Capital Managing Director Leo Casusol adds: “Lynx’s highly differentiated AI model stops fraud and financial crime in real time, at enterprise scale and with unparalleled levels of accuracy. It’s the best kept secret in AI and banking. After extensive co-development with leading global banks, fintechs and enterprise clients, Lynx demonstrates a deep understanding of their fraud prevention, compliance and risk needs and has achieved product-market fit. We are excited to support Dan, Carlos and the Lynx team as they continue to deliver on their vision of an integrated anti-fraud, AML and cyber platform.”
Last year, Forgepoint Capital and Banco Santander announced a strategic alliance to drive cybersecurity investment and innovation globally and this is their first joint investment. Today’s investment is subject to regulatory approval.
Press contact: lynx@missive.co.uk
About Lynx
Lynx is a leading provider in AI software designed to detect and prevent fraud and financial crimes, leveraging deep academic expertise and exceptional engineering developed over 20+ years to deliver best in class results. Drawing on its academic founding and its two-decade long partnership with large financial institutions, Lynx co-designed the solution with stringent banking requirements, regulatory controls and best practices. Lynx developed the ‘Daily Adaptive Model’, a first of its kind proprietary capability that continually learns new behaviours and retains models daily, further enhancing the accuracy of its risk scores. Lynx also applies its technological expertise in the AML space, where it optimizes the way organizations detect and manage financial crime. Learn more at https://lynxtech.com
About Forgepoint Capital
Forgepoint Capital is a leading cybersecurity and digital infrastructure software venture capital firm that invests in transformative companies protecting the digital future. With $1B+ AUM, the largest sector-focused investment team, and portfolio of nearly 40 companies, the firm brings over 100 years of proven company-building experience and its Advisory Council of more than 90 industry leaders to support entrepreneurs advancing innovation globally. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, Forgepoint is proud to help category-defining companies reach their market potential. Learn more at https://forgepointcap.com
