According to EU-Startups, London-based FALKIN has secured €1.7 million ($2 million) in pre-Seed funding to combat financial scams before payments happen. The round was led by TriplePoint Ventures with participation from Notion Capital, BackFuture Ventures, and Revolut’s Group Chief Risk Officer Pierre Decote among others. Founded just this year in 2024, FALKIN already serves tens of thousands of consumers across the US and UK, with 78% of users reporting increased confidence engaging online. The funding comes as AI-related fraud losses in Europe have surpassed €1.3 billion, driving demand for proactive scam-prevention measures. FALKIN’s approach embeds real-time, behavior-based scam prevention directly inside banking apps to detect deception earlier in the fraud lifecycle.
Shifting the battlefield
Here’s the thing about traditional fraud prevention: it mostly kicks in after the damage is done. Most systems activate when money moves, completely missing the emotional manipulation that causes scams in the first place. FALKIN’s co-founder Boaz Valkin put it perfectly: “The new battlefield isn’t payments – it’s persuasion.”
And he’s absolutely right. We’re living in an era where scammers can clone your grandma’s voice or create deepfake videos that look completely real. What once required skilled social engineering now takes minutes with AI tools. So waiting until money moves is basically closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.
The real cost of fraud
The numbers here are staggering. Deloitte estimates U.S. losses from authorized push payment fraud could hit €12.9 billion by 2028. In the UK alone, over seven million people were affected by scams last year. But here’s what most people don’t realize: the true cost of each fraud incident exceeds four times the stolen amount when you factor in legal fees, fines, remediation, and staff time.
Prosecution rates below 1% mean financial institutions are fighting what the article calls an “invisible enemy” with incomplete data and no real deterrent. So prevention isn’t just nice to have – it’s becoming existential for banks.
Europe-wide movement
FALKIN isn’t alone in this space, which tells you something about the scale of the problem. Germany’s Hawk just raised €51.8 million, Czechia’s Resistant AI secured €21 million, and Spain’s Acoru got €10 million. There’s clearly a continent-wide recognition that AI has fundamentally changed the threat landscape.
What makes FALKIN interesting is their focus on embedding protection “where trust already lives” – inside the banking apps people use daily. As co-founder Joel Frisch noted, “no single red flag tells the whole story.” Their approach analyzes multiple deception signals to build a complete picture before users take action.
The future of digital trust
So where does this leave us? Basically, we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how we think about digital safety. The old model of detect-and-respond is breaking down against AI-powered threats that are increasingly sophisticated and scalable.
FALKIN’s plan to use this funding for hiring, product development, and their Safety Labs initiative suggests they’re thinking big. Giving community banks and credit unions easy ways to deploy scam prevention could democratize protection that’s typically only available to major financial institutions.
The big question is whether this proactive approach can scale fast enough to keep pace with scammers who are also well-funded and increasingly sophisticated. But one thing’s clear: the race to protect digital trust is just getting started, and it’s moving way upstream from where most security teams are currently looking.
