ThetaRay

The problem: too many transactions, too little context

An international bank processes millions of transactions a day. Anti-money laundering (AML) and terrorist financing laws require it to identify suspicious patterns, but rigid rules ("flag every transfer above amount X") mostly produce false alarms: almost every alert turns out not to be suspicious, and someone still has to review it by hand.

ThetaRay, founded in 2013 by Amir Averbuch, Ronald Coifman (winner of the National Medal of Science, 1999) and Mark Gazit, built an alternative: a model that learns what "normal" transaction behavior is for a specific customer or payment channel, and flags only a real deviation from it, not a high amount in itself.

Sonar: from rule monitoring to context monitoring

The main product, Sonar, a SaaS version from 2021, analyzes transaction streams in real time for banks, payment companies and financial bodies. According to the company, it is deployed at more than 100 financial institutions in more than 40 countries, including Santander, Payoneer and Travelex.

In 2024 ThetaRay acquired Screena, to expand the platform from a monitoring-only model to a more comprehensive platform for detecting financial crime: not just flagging an anomaly, but supporting the whole review process that follows.

Fundraising and business performance

In 2023 the company raised a $57 million growth round led by Portage, with participation from existing investors such as JVP and OurCrowd, a round that brought its cumulative funding to more than $112 million. According to the company's reports, its number of customers grew tenfold within two years, and its annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew more than fivefold in the same period.