Visa $V agreed to acquire BioCatch, an AI-powered fraud detection company, for $2.4 billion in cash, the payments company announced Monday. Visa is buying the Israeli firm from funds advised by Permira and other shareholders.
The card giant is purchasing the Israeli company from investment firm Permira to bolster its fraud and cybersecurity offerings
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Visa $V agreed to acquire BioCatch, an AI-powered fraud detection company, for $2.4 billion in cash, the payments company announced Monday. Visa is buying the Israeli firm from funds advised by Permira and other shareholders.
BioCatch identifies fraud by monitoring behavioral cues — including how users type, swipe, and hold their devices — to tell genuine account holders apart from bad actors as transactions occur. Its customer base spans more than 350 banks in 21 countries — among them over 100 of the world's biggest financial institutions — with coverage extending to 1.8 billion devices and 760 million individual users. Its AI and machine-learning models collect more than 3,000 anonymized data points per session, analyzing 19 billion user sessions per month.
"Account takeovers and scams cost the global economy over $1 trillion annually and AI is enabling these attacks at unprecedented scale," Andrew Torre, Visa's president of value-added services, said in a statement. "BioCatch will help our clients stop fraud before it reaches the point of payment."
Gadi Mazor, CEO of BioCatch, said the combination with Visa would strengthen the company's ability to protect consumers from financial crime. "For more than a decade, we've demonstrated behavior's unique ability to distinguish the criminal from the legitimate," Mazor said in a statement.
The acquisition expands Visa's existing suite of fraud and cybersecurity products. Visa has directed more than $13 billion toward technology and infrastructure upgrades aimed at combating fraud over the preceding five years. Visa also offers the Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness, an open-source platform that gives clients a way to surface and remediate security weaknesses in their systems.
Closing remains contingent on regulatory sign-off, with Visa targeting completion no later than the final weeks of its fiscal second quarter of 2027.
The acquisition comes as Visa has been restructuring its workforce. The company announced plans to cut roughly 2,600 jobs, or about 7% of its workforce, with freed-up capital expected to flow into areas including value-added services — the same division that encompasses the BioCatch acquisition. Chief Executive Officer Ryan McInerney noted at the time that AI was helping accelerate changes to how work gets done at the company.
Card networks have been expanding their fraud prevention capabilities through acquisitions in recent years. The moves follow a broader consolidation trend: Mastercard $MA closed its $2.65 billion deal for threat intelligence firm Recorded Future in 2024, and Visa made its own move that year by picking up payments protection company Featurespace, according to Reuters.
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