Feedzai is a financial-crime prevention platform founded in Coimbra, Portugal in 2011 by Nuno Sebastiao, Paulo Marques and Pedro Bizarro - three engineers whose research backgrounds include ESA and Carnegie Mellon. The product sits in the payment and onboarding flow of banks, acquirers and payment processors, scoring transactions and identities in real time for fraud, AML and scam risk.
Customers include Citi, Lloyds, Santander, Standard Chartered, Fiserv and a long list of global payment networks. A 2021 Series D led by KKR valued the company at more than $1B, making it a unicorn; that round also financed deeper expansion into scam detection and generative-AI risk. Feedzai's HQ is now split between its Lisbon commercial centre and San Francisco, with Coimbra remaining an engineering stronghold.
The legal parent is Feedzai, Inc., a Delaware C-Corp; the Portuguese operating entity is Feedzai - Consultadoria e Inovacao Tecnologica, S.A., which employs the bulk of its engineering and data-science team.
Feedzai is arguably the best example of a Portuguese company whose centre of research gravity sits outside Lisbon - Coimbra, specifically - but whose commercial structure looks identical to the rest of the Lisbon unicorn cohort.
The founding trio came out of the University of Coimbra's CISUC research group; the early years were strongly European Space Agency flavoured (the founders had worked on mission-control systems). When the product found fit in US financial-crime use cases around 2013, the company quickly set up Feedzai, Inc. as a Delaware C-Corp to host US-led fundraising and enterprise contracts.
The structural logic is the same one OutSystems, Talkdesk, Remote and Unbabel follow: Delaware holds the preferred-share stack (KKR, Sapphire Ventures, Citi Ventures, Capital One Ventures, Citadel Securities, Highland Europe), the Portuguese S.A. employs engineers under Codigo do Trabalho and claims SIFIDE II R&D credits, and an intercompany services agreement reconciles the two.
Where Feedzai differs is the genuine dual-city Portuguese footprint - Lisbon for commercial and executive leadership, Coimbra for core engineering - plus a San Francisco office for the US financial-services sales motion.
Feedzai benefits from the same Lisbon tailwinds as its peers: Web Summit put the city on VC maps in 2016, NHR (until 2024) made it cheap to relocate senior foreign hires, and EU AI Act positioning gives the company a credible "regulated by design" narrative when selling into European banks. Remote, Talkdesk and Unbabel all cluster around the same talent pool.
Feedzai's deeper competitive moat is domain-specific: it has labelled transaction data from a decade of tier-one bank deployments, which is expensive for a competitor to replicate. The 2021 Series D gave it the runway to expand scam detection - a category the UK FCA and US CFPB have both pushed banks to own - and to build generative-AI risk tooling that sits alongside its classical ML stack.
Commercial HQ in Lisbon with an engineering stronghold in Coimbra, and a US presence in San Francisco. Legal parent is Feedzai, Inc. (Delaware).
Yes. A 2021 Series D led by KKR valued Feedzai above $1B.
It sells a real-time AI platform for fraud, AML and scam prevention to banks, acquirers and payment processors.
Operationally yes - most engineering sits in Portugal - but the parent is a Delaware C-Corp, which is the norm for US-VC-backed Portuguese unicorns.
