London-based digital safety startup FALKIN has raised €1.7 million ($2 million) in pre-seed funding to stop scams before they start, as banks and consumers face an “invisible enemy” of increasingly sophisticated digital fraud.
The round was led by TriplePoint Ventures, with participation from Notion Capital, BackFuture Ventures, Aviva/Founders Factory, Haatch, Found Capital, and Founders Capital. Individual investors include Pierre Decote, Group Chief Risk Officer at Revolut, and Ben Enckevort, CTO and co-founder of Metomic.
“The new battlefield isn’t payments – it’s persuasion,” said Boaz Valkin, co-founder of FALKIN. “Protection has to move earlier, to the moment before someone clicks, replies, or transfers. We’re turning AI from a weapon of deception into a tool for defense.”
Founded in 2024, FALKIN builds embedded AI tools that detect manipulation and deception before a transaction ever happens. Instead of flagging fraud after money moves, its technology analyzes behavioral and digital signals in real time, integrating directly into banking and customer-service apps to prevent scams at the source.
“Modern scams are sophisticated, and no single red flag tells the whole story,” said Joel Frisch, co-founder and COO. “The key is to analyze all the signals that reveal deception to build a complete picture. When we embed that intelligence inside the banking apps people already trust, protection becomes effortless.”
The funding comes as AI-fueled fraud accelerates across Europe. German startup Hawk recently secured €51.8 million to expand its anti-money-laundering platform, while Resistant AI in Czechia raised €21 million for document-fraud systems and Spain’s Acoru obtained €10 million to help banks predict AI-enabled scams. Together, they reflect a broader European push toward proactive scam prevention.
According to a recent EU-Startups report, AI-related fraud losses in Europe have surpassed €1.3 billion, driven by deepfakes, voice cloning, and synthetic identity attacks. “AI has blurred the line between what’s real and what’s fake, and traditional systems aren’t built for that reality,” said Sam Stone of TriplePoint Ventures. “FALKIN’s vision to make proactive safety universal has the potential to redefine digital trust.”
Scams have become one of the fastest-growing financial threats of the AI era. Deloitte projects that U.S. losses from authorized push payment fraud could reach €12.9 billion ($15 billion) by 2028, up from €7.1 billion ($8.3 billion) in 2024. In the U.K., more than seven million people were affected by scams last year, yet 71% never reported them. With prosecution rates below 1%, financial institutions are battling an unseen enemy with limited data and few deterrents.
Despite billions spent annually on fraud detection, most systems only trigger once money moves—missing the emotional manipulation that causes scams in the first place. FALKIN aims to change that by identifying deception earlier in the process. In early pilots with banks and tens of thousands of users in the U.S. and U.K., 78% of participants said the tools made them feel safer online, and over half valued prevention more than reimbursement.
The company’s new funding will accelerate hiring, product development, and integrations with financial institutions. It will also support the launch of Safety Labs, a program that helps community banks and credit unions deploy customer-facing scam-prevention tools quickly and easily.
“Scammers are using AI to scale deception,” Valkin said. “We’re using it to scale trust.”
