This week, South African fintech Orca secured $2.35m in seed funding to scale its fraud prevention software for emerging markets. Founded in January 2024 by former Stitch engineers Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby, the startup’s latest raise marks a landmark achievement as one of the largest seed rounds ever secured by an all-female founding team in Africa.
The oversubscribed round was led by Norrsken22 — which also anchored Orca’s $550k pre-seed in early 2024 — with participation from One Day Yes, Enza Capital, and CV VC Africa. Reflecting on the milestone, CEO Thalia Pillay opened up to Launch Base Africa about the highs and lows of the journey so far.
How did you meet the investors, and what excited them about investing in Orca Fraud?
When we first started Orca back in January 2024, I shared a post about it on LinkedIn — and several investors reached out right away. We’ve since gotten to know more funds and different investors over the past few months.
I think what made them excited was that we were a technical co-founding duo who had lived the problem firsthand throughout our careers in banking and fintech. We also are experienced builders who have built for enterprise scale. Looking back, I also think that an all-women founding team is rare on the continent.
With the rise of the fintech unicorns on the continent, more investors are looking for fintech-adjacent startups that could support this leapfrogging.
“…was excited by how quickly Thalia and Carla translated deep domain expertise into an enterprise-grade platform capable of operating across markets, payment ecosystems, and fraud typologies — and by the structural shift in how fraud prevention needs to be built as digital payments accelerate — Norrsken22 (Nivesh Pather)
“…drawn to the combination of technical brilliance and mission-driven clarity. Orca’s work solves one of the most meaningful problems on the continent — that combatting fraud in Africa is fundamental infrastructure, not just a backend requirement” — Enza Capital (Sir John Lazar)
What does Orca Fraud do, the inspiration behind it?
The name Orca comes from “Orchestration” as we initially set out to be a fraud and compliance orchestration platform
Orcas, the toothed whale and the largest member of the oceanic dolphin family, are also apex predators and we felt the need to embody that hunting spirit to hunt down fraudsters
Orcas often band together to take down boats. In that same sense, we believe in the spirit of collaboration by partnering with fintechs, regulators and other point solutions.
Since 2024, the team has been on this journey. What does their progress look like so far?
Since 2024, the team has been on a steady journey of building and refining the company. Our story began in January 2024, when Orca Fraud was founded by me and Carla out of my house in Cape Town after conducting more than 200 market research interviews to understand the fraud challenges faced by fintechs and payment companies.
In early 2024, the company raised a pre-seed round of about $550,000 and onboarded its first clients, including Ozow, Sling Money, Cauridor, and Kazang. Instead of immediately expanding the team after the raise, we chose to remain lean and work closely with a small group of core design partners, iterating intensively on the product and refining it through direct feedback from clients.
By mid-2024, the startup had been selected for Cohort 5 of the Visa Accelerator, a pan-African program designed to support promising fintech companies across the continent. It was only in early 2025 — roughly a year after founding — that the first additional team members were brought in to join the core pod.
Throughout 2024 and 2025, the company also focused on building strategic partnerships with telecommunications operators and banks, expanding its network and integration opportunities. This growth translated into rapid scale: by early 2026, the platform was processing more than $5 billion in monthly transaction volume across more than 70 countries.
The momentum heightened this month, with the announcement of a $2.35 million seed round led by Norrsken22 — returning after the pre-seed — with participation from OneDayYes, Enza Capital, and CV VC Africa. The round was oversubscribed, reflecting strong investor interest in the company’s trajectory.
4. How did you meet your co-founder?
Carla and I studied together at the University of Cape Town, over a decade ago. We were in the same engineering class. I was always a big fan of hers but was lowkey intimidated by her as she was incredibly cool.
We then went our separate ways — she founded an EdTech and I went to banking.
We then re-united working in payments where we were on the same engineering team. When we built together, it felt like we could do anything.
We both wanted to build something that was genuinely diverse and innovative, and we shared this deep conviction about leaving things better than we found them. Orca felt like the natural expression of that.
5. What does competition look like for the firm?
There are some incredible Western-built fraud tools out there — we have enormous respect for what they’ve built. But none of them were purpose-built for Africa. The ML models underlying those tools were trained on Western data sources, which simply don’t reflect how money moves on this continent — the informality, the mobile-first rails, the behavioural patterns that emerge from rapid digitisation in fragmented regulatory environments. That’s a fundamental gap, not a feature gap.
On the banking side, there are legacy players who’ve been in the space a long time. But where we consistently win is on modularity, agility, and the fact that we show up as an extension of our clients’ engineering teams. Fraud teams at banks and telcos don’t just need a tool — they need a partner who moves as fast as the fraudsters do. That’s what we’re built to be.
6. What are the challenges currently facing startups like yours in Africa (South Africa in particular), and what solutions do you propose?
In the first place, I think there is a talent problem. As senior engineers, we thought it’d be the easiest thing to find other senior engineers. However, finding world-class engineering talent in Cape Town when US and European companies are fishing in the same pool has proven to be exceptionally hard.
Another one is data access. African payment data is fragmented, informal, and hard to get. Sometimes we’ll get businesses inbounding who want our AI-powered anomaly detection, yet their data isn’t digitised.
7. What advice can you offer other founders in terms of your lessons so far about investment, business?
Honestly, I’m not sure I’m in a position to be giving advice yet — we’re still very much in the middle of it. But a few things I’m learning:
Spend more time with your customers than your investors. Your customers will tell you what to build.
Raise as little as possible and stay focused. There’s a culture of celebrating how much you’ve raised — but the number on a press release doesn’t build your product.
Be open to change. The thing you thought you were building at month one rarely looks the same at month sixteen. That’s not failure, that’s the job.
And there’s a saying I love — ask for money and you’ll get advice, ask for advice and you’ll get money. Relationships and humility go a long way.
Have an abundance mindset, support other founders, make introductions. But you don’t have to be flashy about it — the people I admire most are just quietly building something real.
And specifically to women founders — stay in it. It is harder. There’s no point pretending otherwise. But nothing worth having comes easy, and the world genuinely needs more of us building at this level.
