AirTree, Greycroft back Australia's FrankieOne
Australia’s AirTree Ventures and US-based Greycroft have led a AUD 23m (USD 15.5m) investment in Melbourne-based fraud prevention platform FrankieOne, lifting its Series A round to AUD 45.7m.
US-based Tidal Ventures, crypto giants Binance and Kraken, and local investors Reinventure, a division of Westpac, and Apex Capital Partners also participated in the extension.
AirTree, Greycroft, Tidal, Reinventure, and Apex took part in a AUD 20m tranche last October with additional support from US-based Mantis Venture Capital. Tidal provided AUD 3m in 2020.
FrankieOne was founded in 2017 by technology advisor Aaron Chipper and serial entrepreneur Simon Costello (pictured, left to right) with a view to creating a digital bank. Difficulties in designing secure and efficient functions for onboarding customers inspired a pivot into regulatory compliance technology development.
FrankieOne provides banks, financial technology companies, and other regulated entities with a single interface and dashboard that connects to hundreds of global identity and fraud-monitoring providers.
The start-up recently opened an office in San Francisco and claims to have grown 4,700% in the past three years. It cited its target market – global fraud prevention – as on track to be worth USD 10.5trn by 2025. Clients include Westpac, Shopify, and PointsBet, a sports better services provider.
The addition of Binance and Kraken as strategic investors is considered a significant indicator of growing interest in compliance risk mitigation as governance and regulatory concerns rattle the crypto space. US regulators have clocked the cost of crypto scams at as much as USD 1bn a year.
“With recent high-profile security breaches shining a spotlight on the responsibility organisations have to protect customers, fraud detection has never been more business-critical,” John Henderson, a partner at AirTree, said in a statement.
“The global fraud detection and prevention market is expected to reach USD 129.17bn by 2029 and we believe FrankieOne is well positioned to continue to capture the growing market.”
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