Visa signed a definitive agreement on 3 August 2026 to buy BioCatch, a Tel Aviv company that uses behavioural biometrics and device data to detect fraud at banks, for $2.4 billion in cash. The sellers are funds advised by the private equity firm Permira and other shareholders.
The deal needs regulatory approvals and other customary conditions before it closes, which Visa expects by the end of its fiscal second quarter of 2027. BioCatch is expected to keep its management team, including chief executive Gadi Mazor, and to sit within Visa's Value-Added Services group.
Visa said BioCatch would add to its existing cyber, fraud, risk and security products and help clients deal with account takeovers, scams, money mules and application fraud.
What BioCatch built
BioCatch analyses how people interact with their devices rather than only what they type. Its system collects more than 3,000 anonymised data points, including keystrokes, mouse movement, touchscreen behaviour, AI agent usage and signs of jailbroken devices, and uses machine learning to judge in real time whether a user shows intent to commit fraud or signs of being coerced or manipulated.
According to Visa, BioCatch protects 1.8 billion devices and 760 million users and analyses 19 billion user sessions a month. It serves more than 350 banking clients in 21 countries, including over 100 of the world's largest banks.
Ynetnews reported that BioCatch's annual recurring revenue reached $100 million in 2023, after growing 49% that year.
“BioCatch will help our clients stop fraud before it reaches the point of payment.”
Why Visa is buying
Visa said account takeovers and scams cost the global economy more than $1 trillion a year, and Andrew Torre, Visa's president of value-added services, said AI was allowing those attacks to run at unprecedented scale. He said BioCatch would help clients stop fraud before it reaches the point of payment.
The deal extends Visa's fraud tools to earlier stages of a customer's relationship with a bank, from opening an account onwards, rather than only at the moment of a transaction. Visa said it had invested more than $13 billion in technology and infrastructure over the previous five years.
Visa described the purchase as part of a strategy of stopping threats upstream, before a payment is attempted. It also pointed to its open-source Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness, an AI tool for finding and fixing software vulnerabilities at scale, as another part of its security work.
The founders, the funding and Permira
BioCatch was founded in 2011. Avi Turgeman, one of its founders, has since died, ynetnews reported. Mazor became chief executive in 2018, when the company had about $7 million in annual revenue and was valued at about $100 million, according to ynetnews.
In April 2020 BioCatch raised a $145 million Series C led by Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, with Industry Ventures joining and existing shareholders American Express Ventures, CreditEase, Maverick Ventures and OurCrowd taking part, ITPro reported.
Permira first invested in 2023 and took a majority stake in 2024, paying about $750 million for 60% in a deal that valued BioCatch at about $1.3 billion, ynetnews reported. Implicator, citing Reuters, wrote that BioCatch's revenue and gross profit roughly tripled under Permira's ownership.
A quick return for Permira
Visa's price is nearly twice the 2024 valuation and comes about two years after Permira took control. Ran Maidan, Permira's partner in Israel, led that earlier investment, according to ynetnews.
Mazor said in the announcement that BioCatch had spent more than a decade showing that behaviour can tell a criminal apart from a legitimate customer. Implicator quoted him saying that, as a society and an industry, the fight against fraud was not being won.
Mazor also said in the announcement that real-time insight into customer intent was becoming more important for financial institutions. Visa did not say whether the price includes any retention or earn-out payments, and it gave no figures for BioCatch's current revenue or headcount.
