A startup called Data.R.X LTD, which likes to be known as Datricks, has closed on a $15 million Series A funding round after developing a platform that uses artificial intelligence to try and uncover financial fraud at enterprises and other organizations.
Today’s round was led by Team8 and saw participation from SAP SE’s venture capital arm, along with existing investors Jerusalem Venture Partners. It comes shortly after the launch of Datricks for Risk Mining as an SAP Endorsed App.
Datricks has created what it likes to call a “financial integrity” tool that uses AI algorithms to analyze and map organization’s business processes and financial transactions across business management platforms such as SAP, Oracle Database and Salesforce. It extracts and correlates information from these platforms to reverse-engineer a comprehensive view of customer’s entire financial workflows, looking for patterns within the data that might indicate financial fraud.
The startup claims its risk mining tools can identify fraud patterns, anomalies and compliance issues with extremely high accuracy. It will then highlight the risks it finds for human investigators, and it can also conduct a detailed root cause analysis of any incidents to identify why the anomaly occurred.
One of the biggest advantages of its platform is that it requires “zero configuration.” All customers need to do is make a couple of clicks to integrate it with their business process management platform of choice. It will be up and running within seconds, the startup said, and after about a week of analyzing the company’s financial data, it will start surfacing issues that require deeper investigation.
Datricks, which was co-founded by Chief Executive Haim Halpern and Chief Technology Officer Roy Rozenblum, believes fraud is a growing concern for enterprises. It cites a report by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners published earlier this year, which found that the average organization loses around 5% of its revenue to fraud annually. That amounts to almost $4.7 trillion in losses globally each year.
The startup explains that identifying fraud has become a huge challenge for enterprises due to the scale of their business. Thanks to digital transformation, globalization and strict regulatory requirements, companies have to deal with an explosion of financial data that’s tied to increasingly intricate and convoluted business processes.
So it’s not surprising that most organizations have trouble keeping track of their finances. As Datricks points out, some of the biggest organizations on the planet, including Meta Platforms Inc. and Nike Inc., have become victims of multimillion-dollar fraud.
Rozenblum told SiliconANGLE that Datricks would have had no trouble in spotting the kind of fraud perpetrated against Meta and Nike, because it would have established patterns that it would instantly be able to detect. He explained that there are a number of typical steps in any procurement process, such as creating and approving a new vendor, generating a purchase order, approving the receipt of goods or services, and receiving an invoice that matches the vendor, purchase order and receipt.
“Ideally, these steps are handled by different people, but that’s not always the case,” Rozenblum said. In the case of Meta and Nike, the manager concerned was able to both approve a new vendor, created by her employee, and approve the receipt of a fake service. When the same person is involved in multiple steps like this, it creates a vulnerability because any fraudulent invoice is more likely to be approved without scrutiny.”
Rozenblum explained that Datricks would be able to flag the manager’s actions as suspicious straight away, because it learns the entire procurement process at each organization, so it can monitor the flow of any new orders and purchases.
“Datricks is designed to detect anomalies, and when it identifies irregular flows, it flags them for the process owner, highlighting potential risks,” he said. “The platform uses AI to assess the severity of the risk by considering numerous data points and comparing them to the baseline of normal processes. This helps determine whether the situation is likely a real fraudulent event.”
According to Halpern, this kind of fraud is one of the biggest challenges faced by financial executives today, hence the need for a comprehensive risk analysis platform. “By understanding the full context of financial processes, Datricks is able to analyze 100% of an organization’s data with no sampling limitations, ensuring complete coverage with minimal false positives,” he insisted.
Datricks might be at the beginning of its journey as a startup, but it has already managed to build up an impressive roster of clients, including multiple Fortune 500 organizations, such as CyberArk Software Ltd., Element Solutions Inc. and ICL Group Ltd., while its partners including consulting firms like Deloitte Touche Ltd., KPMG International Ltd. and PricewaterhouseCoopers International Ltd.
Datricks doesn’t provide any data to back up its claims, but it insisted that it has already prevented “hundreds of millions” of dollars in losses, having processed over a trillion dollars’ worth of transactions for its customers.
SAP General Manager Gero Decker said his company is making a strategic investment in Datricks because its risk mining tools perfectly complement its Business Transformation Management platform. “Its comprehensive solution enables proactive risk mitigation and continuous financial compliance to accelerate business process transformation,” he said.