Shai Gabay and Eli Ben-Nun, two entrepreneurs based in Israel, met in 2018 while working at Cynet, a cybersecurity startup developing extended detection and response tools. While there, they came to realize that there was a growing need to secure payment transfers, which were becoming increasingly susceptible to fraud and cybercrime.

According to one recent survey, payment fraud affected almost 60% of companies in the U.S. in 2022. And of the companies responding to the survey, over half think payment fraud attempts will increase over the next year.

“Many businesses still rely on manual processes to validate payments, which can be time-consuming and prone to errors,” Gabay told TechCrunch via email. “Moreover, the sheer volume of payments processed by businesses often makes it impossible to validate each payment before they are processed by the bank.”

Trustmi, whose platform is designed to integrate with existing payment workflows and systems, attempts to prevent fraud by conducting an initial assessment of past payments and applying this model to future payments in search of anomalies. Leveraging a “trust network” that crowdsources data from vendors and businesses, Trustmi delivers a “comprehensive” approach to payments security, it claims, while letting customers retain full control over their payment processes.

Trustmi also automates and handles audit preparations, establishing financial reporting standards, protecting data and monitoring for potential breaches. The platform’s payment approval workflow, meanwhile, lets users flag errors and attacks, making it easier, ostensibly, to spot areas where errors and attacks frequently occur and take steps to fix them.

“We offer a one-week assessment where historical data is captured to establish a vendor digital fingerprint. This allows us to flag deviations and changes in the vendor’s information and banking details,” Gabay explained. “By capturing a complete view of the payment data flow and analyzing hundreds of data points, we uncover vulnerabilities and eliminate threats effectively.”

It’s tough to know how truthful the “effectively” part is, and TechCrunch can’t speak to Trustmi’s fraud takedown success rate. But despite all that and competition from vendors like Alloy, Hawk AI and Cable, customers appear to buying the sales pitch.

Among Trustmi’s client list are Colgate-Palmolive, Monday.com and CNA Insurance as well as “dozens” of other companies across the manufacturing, pharmaceutical, healthcare and insurance industries. That high-profile customer list attracted the attention of investors, who today put $17 million toward the startup in a Series A round, bringing its total raised to $21 million.

Cyberstarts led the tranche with participation from Zeev Ventures.

“Our latest influx of capital will play a pivotal role in expanding our enterprise customer portfolio and securing business payments at an even greater scale,” Gabay said. “As we move forward, we remain steadfast in our commitment to working with more Fortune 500 companies across all verticals, solidifying our position as the market leader and go-to solution for business-to-business payments security.”

https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/26/trustmi-lands-17m-to-scale-its-payments-fraud-prevention-tech/