Boaz Valkin, Co-Founder & CEO, FALKIN

Today we're meeting Boaz, Co-Founder & CEO at FALKIN. They specialise in protecting people from scams using AI-powered embedded tools that detect fraud before payments happen.

Over to you Boaz - my questions are in bold:

Who are you and what's your background?

Before co-founding FALKIN, I was Head of Product (Operations) at Cazoo, which went Public on the NYSE, Product Director at Moment (Founding Tech employee) and a Product Manager at Prodigy Finance (one of London's first Fintechs).

I first got into Fintech after reading an article about the emerging category in 2014 and joined Prodigy Finance who were pioneering a cross-border lending model. My background has been in building and leading Product, Design, Engineering and AI teams. This includes hiring, scaling teams quickly and launching Products from 0 to 100. My former startups are backed by General Catalyst, Balderton Capital, Index Ventures and LocalGlobe. I've worked on risk model, lending and payment products. I went to university at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, where I studied Finance and International Relations.

What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?

I'm Co-Founder and CEO. I co-founded FALKIN with a passion and determination to protect people from fraud. My focus is providing a tool for banks to protect their customers, by stopping payments before they happen. My own focus at FALKIN is on the product, AI and engineering side, while supporting commercial and Go to Market efforts.

Can you give us an overview of your business?

FALKIN protects people from scams. Founded in 2024, FALKIN emerged in response to a global surge in AI-powered scams and social engineering. Scams have always existed but AI is rapidly decreasing the costs required to deploy highly convincing and sophisticated scams.

FALKIN was started to shift protection earlier in the journey: to the moment before someone clicks, replies or transfers. Its AI-powered embedded tools detect scams before payments happen, analysing manipulation, deception and behavioural risk signals across urgent messages, suspicious websites, items for sale, payment links, invoices and investment offers. FALKIN helps banks protect customers inside the digital experiences they already trust – their own apps and banking digital infrastructure.

Tell us how you are funded?

In 2025, FALKIN raised $2 million in pre-Seed funding. The round was led by TriplePoint Ventures, with participation from Notion Capital, BackFuture Ventures, Aviva/Founders Factory, Haatch, Found Capital, and Founders Capital. The round also included leading FinTech and cyber investors such as Pierre Decote, Group Chief Risk Officer at Revolut and Ben Enckevort, CTO and co-founder of Metomic.

What's the origin story? Why did you start the company?

I founded FALKIN with passion and determination based on a personal experience: a close family member recently lost 15% of her life savings in one afternoon to a bank phishing impersonation scam. I wanted to help – to build the kind of tool that would protect her and others like her.

That's what started FALKIN, which is a digital safety company focused on preventing scams before payments happen– earlier in the lifecycle of scams, before money loss occurs. This is so important – as being a victim of fraud can also lead to other negative impacts on people's lives. Reporting levels are seriously low because people feel a sense of shame and stigma. That makes people even more vulnerable and undermines enforcement.

That's where FALKIN can help. By detecting and preventing fraud before the crime occurs will prevent people losing their life savings as well as safeguarding against the loneliness and emotional turmoil of being a victim of fraud.

FALKIN prevents scams before payments happen by analysing deception and manipulation signals – not just transactions. FALKIN is focused on consumer touchpoints and leveraging AI to make digital safety feel as frictionless as other digital user experiences. Its protection layer sits inside and outside financial apps, making proactive safety universal and effortless.

Who are your target customers? What's your revenue model?

FALKIN's focus is on becoming the embedded digital safety layer for financial institutions globally. We're focusing on UK/US banks as the main GTM and other financial service use cases too. In terms of revenue model – banks pay us per customer on either a quarterly or annual basis.

If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?

If I had a magic wand, I'd create a single national banking accelerator, backed collectively by the major UK banks, to transform how early-stage fintechs collaborate with the industry. The UK banking sector is already world-class, and collaboration with fintechs is strong. But early-stage companies still face a fragmented, slow and often opaque path into banks. Each institution has its own procurement hurdles, its own POC process, and its own criteria for credibility which slows innovation on both sides.

Most major banks already have corporate venture arms, so the foundations are there. A shared accelerator, with banks as LPs, would give everyone a vested interest in helping promising companies succeed. We're seeing this model gain traction in the US, where consortia of banks pool capital and set shared innovation priorities.

A national UK banking accelerator could do the same: define collective problem statements, solicit solutions, and create a single, streamlined route for early-stage fintechs to prove themselves. This would remove one of the biggest blockers in the sector, the fragmented, excessively heavy procurement process, and replace it with something faster, more coordinated, and far more conducive to meaningful innovation.

What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?

Are "don't get scammed" questions/pop-ups and awareness campaigns actually working? We don't think they are and that's hugely concerning. Customers need proactive help, not question sets.

Where do you get your Financial Services/FinTech industry news from?

The Economist, Net Interest by Marc Rubenstein, FinTech brainfood.

Can you list 3 people you rate from the FinTech and/or Financial Services sector that we should be following on LinkedIn, and why?

• Simon Taylor – great insight and analysis.
• Seb Johnson – breaking news on Fintech UK industry.
• Nik Milanovic - combining enthusiasm with real insight.

What FinTech services (and/or apps) do you personally use?

A bit geeky but I have cut down on a lot of apps to build my own GPT coaches within ChatGPT – I love building custom "co-pilots" to help on specific problem spaces at work and at home that cover a variety of financial services.

More broadly my favourite Fintech app is ApplePay.

What's the best new FinTech product or service you've seen recently?

Not strictly fintech but Fyxer.ai is worth the hype – it transformed my Inbox and how I manage email.

Finally, let's talk predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?

I think there is a generational opportunity for new B2C fintech companies to emerge. B2B fintech and embedded fintech gets a lot of investor attention but I think consumers are underserved in multiple areas including investing advice, wealth management, elder/family banking and the intersection of Cyber and Fintech (where FALKIN plays).

Agentic payments are going to be a big nuisance for FIs as the concept of liability and negligence are blurred with frictionless experiences. ChatGPT is already enabling consumers to make purchases within their chat functionality via a Stripe integration – amazing from a consumer point of view but also incredibly challenging to manage from a fraud risk perspective.

Thank you Boaz. Connect with Boaz on LinkedIn and read more about FALKIN at their website.