FALKIN secures £1.6m pre-seed to launch Safety Labs for community banks
This article covers FALKIN, a digital safety company, which has raised £1.6m in a pre-seed round to expand product integrations, hire staff and launch a Safety Labs programme for community banks and credit unions. The funding aims to help banks and credit unions deploy customer-facing, prevention-first tools to reduce losses from increasingly sophisticated, AI-enabled scams.
FALKIN, a digital safety company that embeds scam-prevention inside banking and customer-service journeys, has raised £1.6 million in a pre-seed round to expand product integrations, hire, and launch a Safety Labs programme for community banks and credit unions. The funding arrives as regulators, banks and consumers push for prevention-first defences against increasingly sophisticated, AI-enabled fraud.
Why it matters
Scams are rapidly evolving with the help of AI tools such as voice cloning and deepfakes, making impersonation easier and cheaper to execute. Traditional fraud systems often react after money moves, leaving banks and customers exposed to the emotional manipulation that causes many losses.
Deloitte projects authorised push payment losses in the US could rise from $8.3 billion in 2024 to $15 billion by 2028. In the UK, more than seven million people were affected by scams last year, while 71 percent of victims never report incidents and prosecution rates remain below 1 percent. Those gaps make prevention and better customer-facing interventions a priority for financial firms.
Inside the product
FALKIN uses a suite of AI digital safety tools to analyse manipulation techniques and signs of deception across communication channels. The company embeds that intelligence inside existing digital tools such as mobile-banking apps and customer portals so interventions happen before a payment or reply.
FALKIN says tens of thousands of consumers across the US and UK have used its tools. In user feedback cited by the company, 78 percent reported feeling more confident engaging online and more than half said prevention was more valuable than reimbursement. The startup plans to use the new funding to accelerate hiring, advance product development, broaden integrations with financial institutions, and launch Safety Labs — a framework intended to help community banks and credit unions deploy and evaluate customer-facing prevention tools with minimal lift.
Founder perspective
In the announcement, Boaz Valkin, Co-founder & CEO at FALKIN, said:
The new battlefield isn’t payments - it’s persuasion. Protection has to move earlier, to the moment before someone clicks, replies, or transfers. We’re turning AI from a weapon of deception into a tool for defence.
In the announcement, Joel Frisch, Co-founder & COO at FALKIN, said:
Modern scams are sophisticated, and no single red flag tells the whole story. The key is to analyse all the signals that reveal deception to build a complete picture. When we embed that intelligence where trust already lives - inside the banking apps people use every day - protection becomes effortless.
### Who's backing the round
Who’s backing the round
The pre-seed round was led by TriplePoint Ventures and included participation from Notion Capital, BackFuture Ventures, Aviva/Founders Factory, Haatch, Found Capital and Founders Capital. The round also featured individual fintech and cyber investors such as Pierre Decote, Group Chief Risk Officer at Revolut, and Ben Enckevort, CTO and Co-Founder of Metomic.
In the announcement, Sam Stone, Investor at Triple Point Ventures, said:
We’re proud to back the team as they work to embed digital safety at the heart of modern finance.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
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The bigger picture
FALKIN’s approach reflects a broader shift in fintech and banking: moving from detection after loss to intervention before funds are moved. For UK and European banks, that means investing in customer-facing tools, tighter integration with account interfaces, and collaboration across regulatory and industry boundaries.
As AI lowers the barrier to sophisticated social engineering, start-ups that can surface contextually relevant warnings and interventions inside trusted digital experiences will be an increasingly important part of the financial ecosystem. FALKIN’s Safety Labs and integration focus aim to make those preventative measures easier for smaller banks to evaluate and adopt, a relevant development given regulatory scrutiny and growing consumer demand for safer digital financial services.
They've invested in FALKIN
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| Investor | Sector | Stage | Activity | Team | Connect |
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