Permira takes majority stake in BioCatch

Permira acquired a 57% stake in BioCatch in a secondary buyout from Bain Capital Tech Opportunities and Maverick Ventures, announced in May 2024 and completed in September, at an enterprise value of $1–10bn. The investment was made in cash through Permira Growth Opportunities II, and took the firm from minority shareholder, a position it had held since early 2023, to majority owner. Chief executive Gadi Mazor stayed at the head of the company, and Permira partners joined the board alongside a senior adviser who became chairman. Founded in 2011, BioCatch detects banking fraud by watching how people behave rather than what they know. Its software records the way a user holds a phone, moves a mouse, types a password or scrolls a page, thousands of such signals forming a pattern particular to each individual. When someone logs in with the correct credentials but moves differently, the system flags it, catching the account takeovers that passwords and one-time codes do not. The same approach detects two problems that have grown faster than conventional fraud. In a scam, the genuine customer makes the payment themselves, under instruction from a criminal on the telephone, and every credential is correct; what differs is the hesitation, the unusual care, the pauses that distinguish a coerced transfer from a routine one. In mule accounts, the account is opened legitimately and then used to move stolen funds, which shows in how it is operated rather than in who opened it. Its customers are more than 200 financial institutions, including over 30 of the hundred largest banks, protecting over 400 million banking customers. It had prevented 4.72 billion dollars of fraud since 2018. The company passed $100–200M of annual recurring revenue and reached EBITDA profitability in 2023, and grew that recurring revenue by 43% in the first half of 2024, with revenue from its scam and mule detection products more than tripling over the year. It had raised more than 230 million dollars from investors including Barclays, Citi and HSBC. Permira invested to fund the company’s international expansion and its product development.