The payments giant is betting big on AI-powered behavioral intelligence to combat increasingly sophisticated digital fraud.
Visa just wrote a $2.4 billion check for the ability to tell whether that’s really you tapping your phone screen. The payments giant announced a definitive agreement to acquire BioCatch, an Israeli behavioral biometrics company, in an all-cash deal that ranks among the largest Israeli tech acquisitions ever.
What BioCatch actually does
Think of BioCatch as a digital body language reader. The company’s technology analyzes how users interact with their devices, things like typing speed, swipe patterns, mouse movements, and even the angle at which someone holds their phone. It processes billions of user sessions using more than 3,000 behavioral and device signals to determine whether the person making a transaction is legitimate or a fraudster.
In English: if someone steals your banking credentials and logs in, BioCatch can still flag the session because the imposter doesn’t scroll, tap, or hesitate the way you do.
The company currently protects over 680 million accounts worldwide. Its client roster includes more than 350 banks globally, making it one of the most widely deployed behavioral biometrics platforms in financial services.
BioCatch is headquartered in Tel Aviv and has been on an aggressive growth trajectory. When private equity firm Permira acquired the company in 2024 for roughly $1.3 billion, it was already a recognized player. Under Permira’s ownership, BioCatch nearly tripled its revenue and gross profit. That kind of growth explains the premium Visa is paying: the $2.4 billion price tag represents roughly an 85% markup over that earlier valuation in just two years.
Why Visa wants in
Digital fraud has evolved well beyond the days of stolen credit card numbers. Modern attacks include account takeovers, where criminals gain access to legitimate accounts, and increasingly sophisticated social engineering scams that trick victims into authorizing payments themselves. Traditional fraud detection, which relies heavily on transaction patterns and rule-based systems, struggles with these newer attack types because the transactions often look perfectly normal from a purely financial perspective.
That’s where behavioral biometrics fills the gap. BioCatch’s AI-powered technology can detect when a user is being coached through a transaction by a scammer, or when a session’s behavioral patterns don’t match the account holder’s established profile. It’s a layer of intelligence that sits underneath traditional fraud screening, catching what conventional systems miss.
Visa has been steadily building out its security and fraud prevention capabilities for years. The company already operates a substantial suite of cyber, risk, and fraud solutions. Adding BioCatch gives Visa a proprietary behavioral intelligence layer that can be integrated across its existing ecosystem, potentially offering it as a value-added service to the banks, fintechs, and merchants that rely on its network.
BioCatch CEO Gadi Mazor confirmed that the company’s leadership team will stay in place and that BioCatch’s culture will be preserved post-acquisition.
The deal is expected to close by the end of Visa’s fiscal second quarter of 2027, pending regulatory approvals.
