AirTree Ventures and US venture firm Greycroft have jointly led a $23 million investment in fraud prevention company FrankieOne.
The investment has been structured as an extension of the Melbourne-based company’s October 2021 $20 million Series A investment round (APE&VCJ, Nov 2021) led by the same two firms.
The new raising was supported by Sydney-based venture firm Tidal Ventures, crypto currency investors Binance and Kraken along with Reinventure and Alex Vynokur’s Apex Capital Partners. Tidal Ventures was an early investor in FrankieOne making a $3 million investment in 2020.
FrankieOne offers a software platform that harnesses more than 300 sources of data to automatically verify a new customer while also providing ongoing monitoring of all activity for fraudulent behaviour.
Founders Simon Costello and Aaron Chipper developed the FrankieOne platform on practical experience. In 2017, they set up a start-up called Frankie which they planned to develop into a fintech neobank. They quickly discovered that the market for such a product in Australia was very immature but, in the process, discovered a pain-point that affected all fintech’s trying to get started; there was no efficient way to screen new customers. They pivoted and focused on that problem. Along the way, they realised that for existing financial institutions and neo-banks regulatory compliance was the single biggest challenge.
By 2019 they had developed a platform designed to be adjustable to meet regulatory compliance needs across jurisdictions rather than just for Australia.
Image: FrankieOne founders Simon Costello and Aaron Chipper.