The Milan cybersecurity firm’s Series B wagers on predictive defense over reactive detection to help banks withstand the AI fraud surge
For over a decade, Cleafy has advocated to banks that preemptive action against fraud is more effective than responding post-incident. The Milan-based cybersecurity company has secured €12 million in a Series B funding round, increasing total funding to €22 million, to substantiate this point on a larger scale.
The round is co-led by returning investors United Ventures and Germany’s eCAPITAL. The funds will be used to enhance Cleafy’s predictive security features, broaden global threat intelligence, and strengthen its presence in banking markets throughout Europe and Latin America.
Founded in 2014 by Matteo Bogana, Niccolò Pastore, and Carmine Giangregorio, all from Milan’s Politecnico, Cleafy emerged from a frustration with traditional fraud tools that work in isolation, examining separate transactions using static rules. Often, by the time a bank’s fraud team receives an alert, the funds have already been lost.
Cleafy’s platform takes a different approach by ingesting signals from web, mobile, back-end, and network channels simultaneously, integrating them with real-time threat intelligence to map out how attacks develop and move through a bank’s infrastructure.
The aim is to detect malicious intent, along with the attacker’s tools, methods, and infrastructure, well before any transaction is flagged.
The company now claims to protect over 250 million users across more than 150 financial institutions, including ING, Illimity, and BPS Suisse. It reports zero customer churn throughout its history, which Bogana highlights as a key point in pitches to investors.
“While fraudsters utilize AI to accelerate attacks at machine speed, European banks are countering with outdated, reactive tools,” Bogana stated. “We developed Cleafy to fundamentally shift this dynamic, reconstructing how attacks form and preventing them weeks before they inflict harm.”
This funding round also signals an expansion in Cleafy’s focus. A new product line, Cleafy for Workforce, extends the platform’s capabilities internally, identifying insider threats and compromised accounts within corporate environments, not just external attacks.
The timing is strategic, with two significant European regulations, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the updated Network and Information Security directive (NIS2), elevating the standards financial institutions must meet for cyber resilience.
Cleafy positions its platform as essential infrastructure for compliance, rather than merely an addition to existing tools.
Supported by over 85 international patents, Cleafy’s engine merges real-time data streams with AI-driven threat analysis, facilitated by a team of more than 90 individuals based in Milan, London, Barcelona, and Bogotá.
The challenge for this next phase is whether the platform’s core concept—that preventing fraud at the infrastructure level is more effective than at the transaction level—can be as successful in Latin America as it has been in Europe.