Touchstone invests £1.4m of £16.5m funding for fraud prevention company Featurespace

Touchstone Innovations plc (Touchstone) has participated in a £16.5m funding round in Featurespace Limited (Featurespace), a machine-learning, fraud prevention company.

Touchstone has committed £1.4m to the round, which was led by Highland Europe. The round was also supported by Worldpay Group plc, a global payment processing company, and Invoke Capital, a technology investment company.

The new funding should allow Featurespace to drive revenues of its product platform and to continue to expand internationally.

Martina King, CEO of Featurespace, commented: “We are working with our clients to protect businesses and consumers in the fight against fraud.

“This funding round will enable us to continue to grow our business internationally, building on our progress as a leader in machine learning fraud prevention.”

Following this new investment, Touchstone will hold a 27.9 per cent interest in the company. The current valuation, including this investment is £15.6m.

Featurespace is an ‘adaptive behavioural analytics’ company which aims to address the fast-growing fraud detection and prevention market. According to MarketsandMarkets, this market was worth $14.8bn in 2014 and is growing at 18 per cent per annum.

The company has developed a machine learning software platform, ARIC™, that identifies abnormal behaviour in high-volume, real-time customer interactions.

Through analysing every individual customer interaction and understanding normal behaviour, Featurespace tries to protect customers from fraud attack, and reduces the costs of lost transactions.

Jon Edington, director of technology ventures at Touchstone Innovations, added: “Featurespace is a business with machine-learning technology married to a management team with an excellent track record, and has the potential to be an international entity.

“We initially worked with the late Professor Bill Fitzgerald who was head of signal processing and applied statistics at the University of Cambridge and Dave Excell, his PhD student, to develop the technology and concept and made our initial investment into the company in 2012.

“Subsequently, we have continued to support the business with further funding as well as helping to recruit the management team with the right expertise and experience.”

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