A Chat With João Moura, CEO And Co-Founder, On Transaction Risk Platform: Fraudio

Tell us about Fraudio

Fraudio is a transaction risk platform built for the payments industry, started as a spin-off from a major global payments company. As part of the data team there, we built a product for recovering failed transactions which evolved into something much bigger – a full fraud detection and financial crime management platform.

Today, we work across both the acquiring and issuing sides of payments, helping payment processors, banks, fintechs and PSPs detect fraud, monitor merchant behaviour and manage compliance, all in one place. For card issuers and programme managers, we also help make card programmes safe and compliant from the ground up. We process billions of transactions across more than 180 countries, with clients across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. We’re proud to be tackling fraud on an international scale.

What makes Fraudio unique?

The thing that makes Fraudio genuinely different is our centralised data schema. When we were developing the product, we were originally working with three different payment processors — one in Canada, one in Europe, one in Iceland — and each had its own data schema. I’m quite practical by nature, so rather than building three separate models, we translated all of those schemas into one centralised format.

This decision turned out to be foundational. When a fraud analyst detects a new pattern or writes a new rule, those insights are immediately applied across our entire client base, rather than just one institution. Crucially, our AI models also learn continuously from data across the whole network, meaning every client benefits from the collective intelligence of the platform. This network effect is what drives our ability to scale, whilst also allowing our portal and product to appear the same for everyone, keeping things efficient from a development perspective. No one else in the space is replicating fraud detection and management in this way.

What is your advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

Build for scale from day one, and think globally. I see a lot of founders who build excellent products for a specific market or country, and without realising it, they’ve created something that can’t travel as the problem they’ve solved is too local. My advice is always to ask yourself: could I sell this in Singapore? Could I sell it in Spain, or South Africa? If the honest answer is no, then you’re probably limiting yourself more than you need to. Even if you start local for practical reasons, the architecture of what you’re building should have global potential baked in. If it doesn’t, you may find you’ve shot yourself in the foot before you’ve really got started.
 

What most excites you about Fraudio?

The scale of what’s possible. Our revenue is growing quickly – we grew 4x in 2025 alone. Now, we have the platform and the team to keep that momentum going, and what really excites me is getting our brand out there so that the market truly understands how different we are. Right now we’re doing great work with clients across the world, but showcasing our true value becomes much easier when people already know your name. This year, that’s the inflection point I want to reach – where the market understands our proposition and prospects come to us because they’ve heard of us. We’re also growing our small team this year, but with AI we’re already operating at a scale that simply wasn’t possible before.

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

Fraudio has been operational for seven years, however those seven years haven’t been without challenge. 2024 was a difficult year, if I’m honest. We started the year with close to 30 people and had to make some hard decisions, including significant layoffs. It was tough. That said, the 24 months which followed have been remarkable, and we’ve been growing consistently and quickly. In March this year, our monthly revenue grew by the same amount as our total revenue at the start of 2025. Right now, we have around 25 people, and today alone we’re onboarding seven new team members – a huge commitment to increasing our headcount moving forwards.

What can we hope to see from Fraudio in the future?

Put simply, scale and a true global presence is our north star. The goal is to be integrated with all the major processors, payment rails and orchestrators so that any payments company can work with us through a connection they already have. We don’t want to be a platform that requires a major implementation project to get started. Instead, we want to be available, accessible and already embedded in the infrastructure our clients are using. The vision is straightforward: be the fraud and risk layer that the global payments industry reaches for automatically, without friction.