With an infusion of $8.7 (CHF 8.5) million in new capital, Swiss anti-fraud specialist NetGuardians now has more than $14 million in total funding. The Series C round was led by Swisscom Ventures and Freemont Management, and the company says the financing will help fuel the company’s “continued global expansion,” support additional investment in its anti-fraud platform, and add talent to the NetGuardians team.

“This collaboration with Swisscom represents recognition from a leader in this Swiss market,” NetGuardians’ Chief Operating Officer Raffael Maio said. “We are thrilled that they are recognizing our success and our potential. The investment will help us double the headcount in the coming 18 months.” Andreas Pages of Swisscom’s Business Unit Fintech highlighted NetGuardians’ technology as the kind of “agile and compelling software” that will improve risk mitigation for FIs. “Their highly innovative technology is changing the way to fight financial crime,” Pages said.

Pictured (left to right): NetGuardians Digital Marketing Manager Mine Fornerod and Regional Director for Asia, Eric Margaryan demonstrating FraudGuardian at FinovateAsia 2016.

Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, NetGuardians made its Finovate debut at FinovateAsia in Hong Kong last fall.  At the conference, Digital Marketing Manager Mine Fornerod and Regional Director for Asia Eric Margaryan demonstrated FraudGuardian, a solution that leverages dynamic profiling, pattern-based intelligence, and predictive analytics to provide real-time fraud detection. For the demonstration, Fornerod and Margaryan set the scene of a risk manager who had received a violation alert from FraudGuardian via SMS, and then showed how the technology was able to track down the source of a series of fraudulent transactions. “Thanks to our ground-breaking, unique, holistic approach, you can actually correlate all these user behaviors and really identify the fraudsters with 100% reliability and prevent fraud in real-time,” Fornerod said.

Named to Planet Compliance’s inaugural RegTech Top 100 Power list this spring, NetGuardians partnered with Swiss academic institution, HEIG-VD to use machine learning and AI to build new, fraud-fighting technologies in February and, in January, announced that Keystone Bank in Nigeria would deploy its FraudGuardian technology. With FIs in more than 14 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, NetGuardians has gained 20 new clients and opened offices in Singapore and Kenya in the past year and a half.