TIM Ventures, the Corporate Venture Capital of Telecom Italia, invests 100 thousand euros in Unfraud, the startup that thanks to its original application technology cuts e-commerce fraud by 50%. For TIM Ventures this is the seventh closing in innovative startups, in the space of a few months.
Unfraud has developed software that mimics the behaviors of the human brain, based on artificial intelligence and bio-tech algorithms used in oncology for cell research. The program determines dynamic patterns of behavior, discriminates them and reports them to the system, so as to prevent fraud.
The market value of fraud prevention is now 10 billion euros (about 20 billion by 2019). Losses due to online fraud are estimated at 4 billion euros globally, with an increase of 15 percent annually. In Italy: 60 million euros (109 million euros in 2018).
In this scenario, Unfraud has a great competitive advantage: it doesn't use the usual anti-fraud tools, i.e. strict and static rules, but a technology based on proprietary algorithms that can simultaneously control hundreds of variables for a single transaction and learn from experience.
The Unfraud team is made up of two computer engineers and an economist, all from Ariano Irpino, Armando Monaco, Vincenzo Paduano, Andrea Puzo, who after various international professional experiences have gathered around a strong idea capable of significantly improving the reliability of online transactions.
Salvo Mizzi, CEO of TIM Ventures, said: “This team has all the characteristics to bring Unfraud to global markets. Tenacity, humility, top-level skills, talent. With this operation, TIM Ventures and the Telecom Italia group are also investing in the decisive growth of e-commerce in our country”.
“We are very satisfied with the acceleration path made thanks to TIM #WCAP in 2014: it allowed us to forge ahead and create a product ready for the market. And today we are excited about the great opportunity offered to us by TIM Ventures. It will allow us to pursue our mission more effectively: to make the online market more profitable for merchants and safer for buyers, all with a view to entering the international market in the short term." This was stated by Armando Monaco, CEO of Unfraud.
