Visa Agrees to Acquire BioCatch for $2.4 Billion
Visa Agrees to Acquire BioCatch for $2.4 Billion #
Visa has agreed to acquire BioCatch, the Israeli behavioral biometrics company, for $2.4 billion in cash. Visa has signed a definitive agreement to buy the Tel Aviv-based company from funds advised by London-based private equity firm Permira and other shareholders, with the transaction expected to close by the end of Visa’s fiscal second quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals.
BioCatch, founded in 2011, has built its platform around the way a person interacts with a device, including how they type, swipe, tap, and hold a phone, which the company treats as identifying information comparable to a password or PIN. According to the company’s announcement, its AI and machine-learning models ingest more than 3,000 anonymized data points per user session and collectively analyze 19 billion sessions every month. The technology is deployed across more than 350 banking clients in 21 countries, including more than 100 of the world’s largest financial institutions, reaching 1.8 billion devices and approximately 760 million individual users.
For Visa, the acquisition is central to its push to grow its value-added services division, which sells fraud prevention, cybersecurity, and analytics products to financial institutions and has become one of the company’s fastest-growing revenue streams. Andrew Torre, Visa’s president of value-added services, said account takeovers and scams cost the global economy over $1 trillion annually and that artificial intelligence is enabling such attacks at unprecedented scale. The deal is designed to let Visa’s clients intercept fraudulent activity before a payment is submitted, rather than flagging transactions after the fact.
The acquisition also marks a swift and lucrative exit for Permira, which acquired a controlling 60% stake in BioCatch just two years ago in a deal that valued the company at around $1.3 billion, roughly half the current price. The private equity firm invested approximately $750 million in that transaction. BioCatch CEO Gadi Mazor is expected to remain in post following completion of the deal, and the company’s operations are not anticipated to change materially.
The deal follows recent consolidation among card networks seeking to embed fraud intelligence directly into their infrastructure. Mastercard closed its $2.65 billion acquisition of threat intelligence firm Recorded Future in 2024, and Visa acquired payments-protection company Featurespace that same year. Visa has also recently announced plans to cut around 2,600 jobs as part of a technology restructuring, with savings earmarked to fund investment in areas including its value-added services business, the same division that will absorb BioCatch.
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