Cleafy Raises €12M to Fight AI Banking Fraud

Cleafy Secures €12 Million in Series B Funding to Combat AI-Driven Banking Fraud With Predictive Technology

The global financial sector is facing an unprecedented surge in AI-powered fraud, and one European cybersecurity startup is stepping up to meet that challenge head-on. Cleafy, a Milan-based fraud intelligence and prevention platform, has successfully closed a €12 million Series B funding round, bringing its cumulative total funding to €22 million. The round was co-led by United Ventures and eCAPITAL, two of Europe's prominent technology-focused venture investors. This latest AI funding milestone signals a growing recognition within the investment community that the battle against digital banking fraud requires smarter, more adaptive, and predictive solutions — not just reactive defences.

This AI funding news comes at a critical time when financial institutions across Europe, Latin America, and beyond are wrestling with increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks that traditional security tools are simply no longer equipped to handle. The announcement has drawn considerable attention in the fintech and cybersecurity communities, and for good reason — Cleafy's approach to fraud prevention is genuinely different from anything the market has seen before.

The Growing Threat of AI-Driven Fraud in the Banking Sector

To truly understand why this funding round matters, it is important to first appreciate the scale and complexity of the problem that Cleafy is trying to solve. Over the past few years, financial institutions have been grappling with a rapidly evolving fraud landscape. Fraudsters are no longer relying on brute-force attacks or simple phishing schemes. Instead, they are leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to craft highly convincing social engineering campaigns, exploit behavioural patterns, and launch coordinated multi-channel attacks that are extraordinarily difficult to detect and even harder to stop in real time.

Traditional security infrastructure was built for a different era. Tools that monitor transactions in isolation, flag anomalies after the fact, or rely on static rule-based engines are fundamentally ill-equipped to deal with modern fraud that operates dynamically across web browsers, mobile applications, backend systems, and network channels simultaneously. The result is that banks and financial institutions find themselves perpetually one step behind attackers, absorbing losses and reputational damage while struggling to maintain compliance with stringent European regulatory frameworks such as DORA (the Digital Operational Resilience Act) and NIS2.

The damage is not just financial. When fraud occurs at scale, it erodes consumer trust, disrupts operations, and opens financial institutions up to significant regulatory penalties. It is within this context that Cleafy's platform has emerged as a transformative force — one that does not simply respond to attacks but actively predicts and disrupts them before they can cause harm.

How Cleafy's Predictive Platform Works — and Why It Stands Apart

Cleafy was founded in 2014 by three cybersecurity and fraud experts who studied and worked together out of Milan Polytechnic: Matteo Bogana, Nicolò Pastore, and Carmine Giangregori. From the very beginning, the founding team identified a fundamental flaw in the prevailing approach to banking fraud prevention — the entire industry was playing defence, and doing so reactively. Bogana, who serves as CEO, recalls that when Cleafy was founded, the dominant thinking within the fraud industry was that certain trade-offs were unavoidable: better detection meant more friction for customers, and achieving real-time precision at scale was simply not feasible without local agents or extended model training cycles.

The Cleafy founders, who came to the problem from outside the entrenched assumptions of the fraud establishment, believed this was a false constraint. They set out to build a platform that would flip the entire script — treating fraud not as a series of isolated suspicious events but as an active, structured attack that could be mapped, anticipated, and disrupted long before any financial damage occurred.

The technology that powers Cleafy today is the product of more than a decade of research, development, and refinement. At its core, the platform rebuilds complete attack chains by aggregating and correlating data from web sessions, mobile applications, backend transaction systems, and network-level signals, then enriching that picture with global threat intelligence. This multi-dimensional data fusion gives Cleafy's AI engine an extraordinarily detailed view of how attacks are being constructed and executed in real time — enabling the system to predict entire attack paths rather than merely detecting individual suspicious signals.

What makes this approach particularly compelling is how it integrates with a financial institution's existing security stack. Rather than replacing legacy tools or requiring institutions to rip and replace their current infrastructure, Cleafy is designed as a contextual enrichment layer. A bank's transaction scoring engine, for instance, becomes measurably more accurate when it receives Cleafy's pre-transaction attack-phase classification. A SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system becomes far more actionable when it ingests Cleafy's session-level threat intelligence. In this way, Cleafy does not diminish the value of surrounding tools — it amplifies it.

The platform is currently backed by more than 85 international patents, a testament to the depth and originality of the underlying research. Cleafy's engine blends real-time data streams with AI-powered threat analysis to achieve detection capabilities that competitors have consistently struggled to replicate. The company has maintained zero customer churn over more than a decade of operations — a remarkable achievement in any industry, but especially in enterprise cybersecurity, where dissatisfaction and switching costs typically drive significant attrition.

Cleafy also recently launched an extension of its platform called Cleafy for Workforce, which expands protection beyond external customer-facing fraud to encompass insider threats and internal enterprise systems. As financial institutions increasingly grapple with the risk of malicious or negligent insiders, this capability positions Cleafy as a comprehensive fraud intelligence solution rather than a narrowly focused point product.

€12 Million Series B: What the Capital Will Fund and Where the Company Is Headed

The €12 million Series B round, co-led by United Ventures and eCAPITAL, represents the latest chapter in a compelling AI funding story that has now seen Cleafy accumulate €22 million in total investment since inception. This AI funding news is particularly notable because it reflects investor conviction in a company that has not just built compelling technology but has demonstrated it at meaningful scale across some of Europe's most demanding financial institutions.

At present, Cleafy protects more than 250 million end users across a portfolio of over 150 banking and financial institutions. Its client roster includes marquee names such as ING, Illimity, and BPS Suisse — institutions that have chosen Cleafy not because of marketing promises but because the platform has consistently delivered results in production environments under real-world attack conditions.

The fresh capital will be deployed across three primary strategic priorities. First, Cleafy will accelerate the development of its predictive technology capabilities, deepening the sophistication of its AI engine and expanding its ability to anticipate attack patterns before they crystallise. Second, the company will significantly scale its global threat monitoring infrastructure, ensuring that its intelligence layer keeps pace with the rapidly evolving tactics of international fraud networks. Third, and perhaps most ambitiously, Cleafy will pursue aggressive geographic expansion — strengthening its existing European presence while making substantial inroads into the Latin American banking market, where digital fraud is growing rapidly and institutions are actively seeking modern solutions.

Beyond technology and market expansion, Cleafy is also focused on reinforcing its compliance posture. The European financial sector is currently undergoing a major regulatory transformation, with DORA and NIS2 placing new and stringent requirements on how financial institutions must manage and report cyber-related operational risks. Cleafy's platform is specifically engineered to support these compliance mandates, and the company plans to deepen this alignment as the regulatory environment continues to evolve. New corporate partnerships are also in the pipeline, designed to embed Cleafy as a core element of the broader fraud defence infrastructure that European and Latin American banks rely upon.

Building a Diverse and Global Team to Tackle a Global Problem

One dimension of Cleafy's story that deserves particular attention — especially given the broader conversation around representation in the technology sector — is the company's commitment to building a diverse, international team. With more than 90 employees spanning four countries, Cleafy has grown well beyond its Italian roots. The company's headquarters remain in Milan, but it now maintains offices in London, Barcelona, and Bogotá — a footprint that reflects both its European focus and its ambitions in the Latin American market.

Approximately 25 percent of Cleafy's workforce is female, which, while still reflecting the broader gender gap that persists across the technology industry, represents a deliberate effort to recruit more diversely than many of its cybersecurity peers. Bogana has acknowledged this openly, framing it as an ongoing commitment rather than a solved problem. Building diverse teams is not just an ethical imperative for Cleafy — it is a strategic one, given that diverse perspectives tend to produce more robust security thinking and a broader range of approaches to problem-solving.

The company's geographic distribution also brings meaningful operational advantages. Having teams in London gives Cleafy close proximity to one of the world's most important financial centres and to UK-specific regulatory developments post-Brexit. Its Barcelona office plugs the company into Spain's vibrant fintech ecosystem, while the Bogotá presence provides a crucial beachhead for the company's Latin American expansion strategy.

Cleafy, the AI World, and the Future of Fraud Prevention

The broader AI funding landscape in 2026 tells a story of relentless investment in solutions that apply artificial intelligence to some of the world's most pressing problems, and fraud prevention in financial services ranks consistently among the most urgent of these challenges. At The AI World Organisation, which tracks and celebrates AI-driven innovation across sectors globally, developments like Cleafy's Series B are not just AI funding news — they are proof points of how thoughtfully applied AI can fundamentally transform the safety and resilience of critical systems that billions of people depend upon every day.

The convergence of AI and cybersecurity in the banking sector is one of the defining technology narratives of this decade. As fraudsters adopt ever more sophisticated AI tools to construct their attacks, the institutions tasked with stopping them need equally sophisticated AI defences. Cleafy represents one of the clearest examples of this counter-movement — a company that has spent over a decade building AI systems not for novelty's sake but for genuine operational impact at global scale.

What the Cleafy story also illustrates is a broader truth about how transformative AI companies tend to be built. They tend to emerge not from incremental improvements on existing approaches but from a willingness to challenge fundamental assumptions. When Bogana and his co-founders decided in 2014 that the trade-offs the fraud industry had accepted as fixed were actually false constraints, they set Cleafy on a path that has ultimately proven that vision correct. Real-time, cross-channel, predictive fraud prevention at scale is not just theoretically possible — Cleafy has demonstrated it in practice, across hundreds of financial institutions, protecting hundreds of millions of users, without a single customer walking away in more than a decade.

As the company now accelerates into new markets, deepens its technology, and expands its team, the questions are no longer about whether Cleafy's approach works. The question is how much of the global banking sector will move to adopt it — and how quickly the rest of the fraud prevention industry will be forced to rethink its own assumptions in response. With €22 million in total funding, a proven platform, a growing enterprise client base, and a clear roadmap for the future, Cleafy is well-positioned to lead that transformation.