Casap raises $33.5M to fight the fraud customers commit against their own banks

For decades, card fraud had a familiar villain: a stranger with your stolen numbers. That villain now has company, and it is often the cardholder.

Casap, a startup that builds AI tools for handling card disputes and chargebacks, has raised $56 million, according to Fortune. The company’s pitch rests on one uncomfortable shift: cardholders themselves now account for nearly a third of fraudulent transactions.

That is a different problem from classic identity theft. The customer is not the victim here. The customer is the one filing the false claim.

The rise of the “white lie” chargeback

The industry calls this first-party fraud. A customer buys something, receives it, then tells the bank the purchase never happened or the item never arrived. The bank reverses the charge, and someone else absorbs the loss.

Casap’s CEO says the behavior often comes from how people rationalize it.

“It comes back to people thinking ‘this is a victimless crime, banks have a lot of money and I need money’, so people tell what they think are white lies,” said Shanthi Shanmugam, Casap’s CEO and co-founder.

The numbers suggest those small fibs add up. First-party fraud is estimated to be a $100 billion annual problem across the financial sector. At some institutions, it makes up 30-50% of fraud losses.

What Casap actually does

Casap was founded in 2023 by Shanmugam, who previously worked at Robinhood, and Saisi Peter, formerly of Chime. The company sells an agentic AI platform to banks and credit unions that handles the dispute process from intake to resolution.

The company says its platform can automate up to 80% of payment dispute cases. Resolution times can fall to as little as 5 to 27 days.

Chartway Federal Credit Union offers the clearest case study. Its resolution times reportedly dropped from three months to 12 days. The credit union also saw approximately 90% lower per-claim costs and a 95% increase in chargeback win rates.

A fast climb for a young company

The new funding follows a quick run of earlier raises. Casap closed an $8.5 million seed round in October 2024. It followed with a $25 million Series A in August 2025, a round described as a record for the issuer-side payment disputes sector.

Before the latest round, Casap’s total funding was reported at around $33.5 million. The $56 million figure, as reported by Fortune, marks a sizable step up from that base.

Growth has kept pace with the checkbook. Casap reportedly serves approximately 45 financial institutions. It also reported 642% year-over-year growth by mid-2026.

The recognition has followed too. Tearsheet named Casap its AI Company of the Year in September 2026. Shanmugam’s company also landed on Inc.’s Female Founders 500 list in March 2026.

What this means for banks and fintech

For banks and credit unions, the main stakes are cost and customer trust. Every disputed transaction costs money to investigate, and every wrongly approved claim is a direct loss. Casap’s results at Chartway suggest automation can shrink both, at least for institutions willing to hand much of the process to software.

For the fintech sector, the raise signals that investors see back-office fraud operations as a serious category, not just a feature tacked onto a payments product. The founders’ backgrounds at Robinhood and Chime also point to a broader trend: consumer fintech veterans moving into infrastructure that sells to traditional banks.