The Story of Cleafy: Building the Future of Fraud Prevention

In 2014, when cybersecurity experts said it couldn’t be done, Cleafy’s founders did it anyway. “Everybody was telling us, you are trying to fix a problem that is not actually technological complex, but scientifically impossible to do,” Matteo Bogana shares in a recent Category Visionaries episode. “There have been ten years of research in this topic between universities and corporations, and so you will not do it.”

The breakthrough? Real-time detection of web content tampering without contextual information. This technical achievement would become the foundation for Cleafy’s comprehensive fraud prevention platform.

The early days played out like a startup movie script. Four founders, working with limited resources, faced the dual challenge of proving their technology and finding their first customers. “The early days were very funny, actually. So it was like living in a movie,” Matteo recalls. “They were very tough because at the very beginning the market was not actually there. We arrived quite early for the kind of technology that were developing.”

For two years, they struggled to gain traction. The challenge wasn’t just technical validation – it was earning trust from potential customers. “We are mixing together actually cybersecurity and the fraud in the same context and in the same solution,” Matteo explains. “So people were not actually very willing to discuss and to open up their problems when were presenting because were not IBM, were not a consolidated company.”

Rather than following the typical startup playbook of aggressive US expansion, Cleafy focused on Europe. This decision proved prescient as European financial regulations created more sophisticated fraud challenges than the US market, allowing them to build deeper expertise.

Today, Cleafy serves mid-large banks and financial institutions, targeting Fortune 500 customers and growth-stage fintechs. Their unique approach combines cybersecurity and fraud prevention, breaking down traditional silos between these functions. This resonates particularly well with modern fintechs who “already have in place a mindset in which there are no silos and no barriers.”

Looking ahead, Matteo sees AI transforming both attack vectors and defense mechanisms. “What is happening into the future is the fact that more and more AI based attacks will rise,” he predicts. However, he emphasizes that AI won’t replace human expertise: “You cannot imagine that there’s going to be an automatic system capable to all the job on its own.”

Instead, Cleafy envisions AI augmenting human analysts by handling routine tasks while enabling them to focus on complex threats. “The future is for sure in AI on the side of attackers is with AI on the side of the defenders,” Matteo explains. “But more and more in the future, the quality of the analysts that are going to investigate the most complex attacks and the most dangerous attacks will be mandatory.”

This vision – combining advanced technology with human expertise – positions Cleafy at the forefront of evolving cybersecurity challenges, ready to protect financial institutions against increasingly sophisticated threats.