Practically every company that handles financial transactions, whether it’s an online merchant or a bank, is a potential target for fraudsters. Feedzai Inc. today announced that it has raised $50 million in a late-stage funding round to help companies mitigate the threat.

The San Mateo-based startup, which was originally founded in Portugal, offers a fraud prevention platform based on the open-source Apache Spark data processing framework. The software relies on a combination of financial records and related customer information from an organization’s internal systems. After piecing together the details, Feedzai will run the data by two different evaluation mechanisms to determine the risk that a transaction carries. 

The first is a set of policies that can be customized for different use cases. An e-commerce company, for example, may wish to flag purchases automatically if they exceed a certain dollar value. The rule set is paired with machine learning models that can adapt themselves based on trends in scammer activity to catch more subtle fraud attempts.

According to Feedzai, the risk analysis is performed in near real-time as new transactions come down the pipe. Information about suspicious activity is turned into reports designed to help a company’s analysts quickly identify the best course of actions.

Users can also fine-tune the machine learning models running on the platform through a graphical data science console. According to Feedzai, the interface doesn’t require any special knowledge of Spark and the other complex technologies running under the hood.

Feedzai’s platform is used at more than 60 organizations, including Citigroup Inc., payment processing giant First Data Corp. and other financial heavyweights. To further widen adoption, the startup’s will invest today’s funding in scaling its business operations. Feedzai expects to pass the 300-employee mark by the end of the year.

The Series C round was led by an unnamed investor with participation from Sapphire Ventures, which is closely affiliated with SAP SE. The enterprise software giant is one of the partners that Feedzai lists on its website. In total, Feedzai has raised more than $76 million from investors.

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