Scams are moving faster than the systems built to stop them

For years, banks designed fraud controls around transactions that customers did not authorise. The harder problem now is often the opposite: a customer is manipulated into approving the payment. Voice cloning, deepfake video and highly personalised social engineering give criminals more convincing ways to create urgency and impersonate people or institutions a victim trusts. By the time a transfer reaches a conventional transaction monitoring system, the fraudster may already have won the argument.

Faster payments leave defenders with less time to intervene. Reimbursement rules for authorised push payment scams in the UK, alongside tighter European requirements around instant payments and fraud prevention, also place more responsibility on financial institutions. Banks need to understand the intent and context forming around an account before a suspicious payment is initiated.

Looking for intent before money moves

Acoru approaches fraud from the account level. Its monitoring platform continuously evaluates first party accounts and the counterparties they interact with, combining activity across channels to identify signals that may indicate a future victim, an unwitting money mule or an account being prepared for laundering. Rather than treating each payment as an isolated event, it builds a changing risk picture around the account.

The platform scores and classifies accounts, gives analysts a central environment for investigation, and can feed its findings into the systems a bank already uses. Acoru also offers a consortium model through which participating institutions can share account classifications while retaining control of their underlying data. That network view matters because scam proceeds rarely stay within one institution.

An AI native platform for fraud teams

Acoru was built after generative AI had begun changing both the economics and the speed of fraud. Its current platform combines data ingestion, omnichannel orchestration, pre-fraud classification and analyst tooling. The company is also developing agentic capabilities that can investigate suspicious patterns, propose responses and explain the signals behind them. The aim is to help specialist teams act earlier while keeping human judgement at the centre of consequential decisions.

Repeat founders from the fraud prevention world

Pablo de la Riva Ferrezuelo and David Morán founded Acoru in Madrid, having previously built Buguroo, (later renamed Revelock), which used behavioural biometrics to protect digital banking users and was acquired by Feedzai in 2021. Acoru draws on that experience, but addresses a different point in the attack: the behavioural and contextual signals surrounding an account before fraud turns into a payment.

The company has assembled an international team serving banks and financial institutions and is expanding across Europe and the Americas. Its focus remains narrow by design: scam prediction, money mule classification and account centred fraud prevention.

When we invested, and what followed

We led the €4 million seed round, with participation from Athos Capital, out of Adara III fund. The company launched publicly in 2025 after developing the product in stealth. In October 2025, Acoru raised a €10 million Series A led by 33N Ventures, with Adara and Athos returning. The round is supporting product development and commercial expansion in Europe and the Americas.

Why we backed Acoru

Fraud prevention is becoming an infrastructure problem. Banks need systems that can combine fragmented signals, learn from activity across accounts and institutions, and give investigators a defensible reason to act before money leaves. Pablo and David had already built a company at the intersection of banking behaviour and cybersecurity. With Acoru, they are applying that experience to the new generation of AI enabled scams. That combination of specialised data, trust and security is exactly what we mean by Trusted AI Infrastructure.