Visa has agreed to acquire BioCatch for $2.4 billion in cash, buying a fraud-detection company whose models judge who is at the keyboard during an online banking session. The payments network announced the signed agreement on August 3, 2026, and is buying the business from funds advised by the private equity firm Permira along with other shareholders.
The deal moves Visa’s fraud tooling well ahead of the card transaction. BioCatch, founded in 2011 and based in Tel Aviv, sells to banks rather than merchants, and its software scores the digital banking session itself: the account application, the login, the transfer request. Visa says the models read thousands of application, behavioral, device and network signals in real time, among them keystrokes, touch gestures and how a person physically handles a device.
The scale Visa is buying sits inside banks, not on the card network. According to the announcement, BioCatch protects 1.8 billion devices and 760 million users, serves more than 350 banking clients across 21 countries including over 100 of the world’s largest banks, and analyzes 19 billion user sessions a month.
What behavioral scoring is meant to catch
Visa framed the purchase around four fraud types: account takeover, scams, money mules and application fraud. Those categories turn on intent rather than credentials. In a social-engineering scam the login is genuine and the payment is authorized by the real accountholder, which is exactly what defeats controls built to answer whether the right person is on the account. Visa says BioCatch’s models assess user intent and any signs of coercion or manipulation continuously through a session, and that insights shared across its network of institutions sharpen the risk score.
“Account takeovers and scams cost the global economy over $1 trillion annually and AI is enabling these attacks at unprecedented scale,” said Andrew Torre, president of value-added services at Visa, in the announcement. He said BioCatch would help clients stop fraud before it reaches the point of payment.
The attack side of that argument is well documented in coverage of the same market: Unite.AI has reported on how AI is fueling the rise in payment fraud and on an IBM study putting AI inside one in four malicious breaches.
Visa’s second AI fraud purchase in under two years
Visa completed its acquisition of Featurespace on December 19, 2024, taking on a Cambridge-based transaction-monitoring company and folding it into its Risk and Identity Solutions unit. Featurespace’s models watch payment events; BioCatch’s watch the person generating them. Both land in the value-added services business Torre runs, and together they give Visa detection at two different points of the same fraud.
Visa says it has invested more than $13 billion in technology and infrastructure over the past five years to protect the payments system and push fraud rates down.
Venture money has been chasing the same problem from the startup side. Tangos raised a $20 million seed round at a $100 million valuation to apply autonomous AI to financial crime investigations, and Gradient Labs doubled its Series A to $26 million as financial institutions took on AI agents for customer operations.
What the price reflects
Permira completed its majority purchase of BioCatch in September 2024 at a $1.3 billion valuation, building on a minority stake it had taken in early 2023. At that point, Permira said, BioCatch had passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, reached EBITDA profitability in 2023, and grown annual recurring revenue 43% year over year in the first half of 2024, with more than 200 financial-institution clients and about 400 million banking customers covered.
Visa’s $2.4 billion prices that business at roughly 1.8 times what Permira’s buyout valued it at. In the intervening period, on the two companies’ own figures, BioCatch’s client count went from more than 200 institutions to more than 350, and the user base it covers rose from around 400 million to 760 million. The company is run by Gadi Mazor, who joined as chief operating officer in 2018 and took the chief executive role in 2021.
For banks already running BioCatch, the practical question is how quickly its session scoring is wired into the fraud and risk products they buy from Visa, and on what commercial terms. Visa expects the transaction to close by the end of its fiscal second quarter of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.
