Latest news with #Casap
Finextra
08-08-2025
- Business
- Finextra
AI-powered payment disputes platform Casap raises $25m
Casap, a firm using AI to automate payment disputes and tackle first party fraud, has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Emergence Capital. 0 Lightspeed Venture Partners, Primary Venture Partners, and SoFi joined the round, which brings Casap's total funding to $33.5 million. Casap claims that disputes are one of the most outdated, slow, and expensive workflows in financial services. As fraud tactics evolve, teams can't keep up, leaving institutions vulnerable and consumers frustrated. First-party fraud now accounts for 30-50% of total fraud losses. The firm's AI agents are built to handle the full dispute lifecycle, from intake to chargeback filing and member communication, in one system. The platform analyses evidence, predicts outcomes, and automates key actions, such as issuing credits, filing chargebacks and responding to merchants. A proprietary fraud score identifies suspicious consumers and merchants to proactively reduce disputes. Casap says that the credit unions, banks and fintechs using its technology can see over 50% reduction in fraud losses, positive ROI in weeks and scaled case volume without additional headcount. The new funding will be used to upgrade Casap's first-party fraud scoring and AI decisioning and hiring. 'Financial institutions are under pressure to do more with less: stronger consumer retention, fewer losses, and no regulatory missteps,' says Shanthi Shanmugam, CEO, Casap. 'Casap delivers exactly that, transforming the dispute experience into a loyalty driver and a competitive advantage."
Yahoo
07-08-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Casap Raises $25M Series A to Revolutionize Payment Disputes with AI and Eliminate First Party Fraud Losses
Backed by Emergence and Lightspeed, Casap is rebuilding the broken dispute process, using intelligent automation to resolve cases in record time and strengthen consumer loyalty at scale. NEW YORK, August 07, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Casap, the leader in intelligent automation for dispute and fraud operations, has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Primary Venture Partners, SoFi and others. This brings Casap's total funding to $33.5 million and sets a new record for venture investment in the payment disputes category. The raise signals a surge in demand from financial institutions looking to streamline dispute resolution and reduce fraud losses while building consumer loyalty. Disputes are one of the most outdated, slow and expensive workflows in financial services. As fraud tactics evolve, teams can't keep up, leaving institutions vulnerable and consumers frustrated. First-party fraud now accounts for 30-50% of total fraud losses and is especially challenging for financial institutions to identify. Proven results at scale Casap is the first company to systematically solve first-party fraud. Casap's AI-powered platform is already in use by a fast-growing base of credit unions, banks and fintechs seeking to modernize their dispute process and lower fraud. Chartway FCU and MidSouth Community FCU are among the many institutions seeing real impact: over 51% reduction in fraud losses, positive ROI in weeks and scaled case volume without additional headcount. By replacing fragmented tools with a unified intelligent system, Casap helps teams resolve cases faster and build consumer trust. Transforming the broken dispute process with AI From intake to chargeback filing and member communication, Casap's AI agents handle the full dispute lifecycle in one system. The platform intelligently analyzes evidence, predicts outcomes, and automates key actions, such as issuing credits, filing chargebacks and responding to merchants. Casap's proprietary fraud score identifies suspicious consumers and merchants to proactively reduce disputes. Customers benefit from real-time decisions, predictive win scores, and self-service experiences that build trust. Expanding to meet growing customer demand Customers are actively requesting Casap to help manage other post-transaction workflows. This funding will accelerate the expansion of Casap's first-party fraud scoring and AI decisioning, support key hiring and continue executing on its vision of eliminating friction across the payments lifecycle. "First-party fraud is on the rise, and financial institutions are armed with outdated tools. Casap turns disputes—one of the most emotionally charged moments in finance—into an opportunity to earn trust, the only currency that matters," said Carlotta Siniscalco, Partner at Emergence Capital. "In this industry, you can't move fast and break things. Shanthi and Saisi took a methodical approach to building Casap, leading with a deep understanding of risk, compliance, and empathy for the customer. Casap embodies the transformational infrastructure play we love to back at Emergence." "Casap has been the most meaningful operational upgrade to our claims process in decades. Previously, we had to choose between delivering a great member experience or keeping fraud losses in check. With Casap, we're able to do both," said Rob Keatts, Chief Strategy Officer at Chartway FCU. "It's replaced a patchwork of spreadsheets, emails, and manual tracking with a system that gives us real-time visibility and peace of mind. Our team can now resolve issues faster, without relying on third parties or worrying about missed deadlines. It's a modern solution that actually fits the way we want to operate." "Financial institutions are under pressure to do more with less: stronger consumer retention, fewer losses, and no regulatory missteps," said Shanthi Shanmugam, Co-founder and CEO of Casap. "Casap delivers exactly that, transforming the dispute experience into a loyalty driver and a competitive advantage. And disputes are just the beginning – we're redefining how financial institutions operate payments to turn fraud and inefficiency from everyday realities into rare exceptions." About Emergence Capital Emergence Capital invests in the people reshaping how the world works—from the rise of cloud to the new wave of AI-powered work. We go deep with visionary founders and partner with them from first check to IPO, powering their journey from emerging to iconic. Our portfolio includes category-defining companies like Salesforce, Veeva, and Zoom, along with the next generation of AI-powered startups like Unify, and Bland. Along the journey, we bend the odds of success; more than 9 in 10 of our early-stage investments raise successful follow on rounds, more than 1 in 5 go on to exceed a billion dollar valuation, and more than 1 in 10 have gone public. Learn more at and follow us on LinkedIn. About Casap Casap is an AI-powered disputes automation and fraud prevention platform. With built-in regulatory expertise and network integrations, Casap's intelligent automation identifies fraudulent claims early and delivers fast, frictionless dispute and chargeback resolution at a fraction of today's cost. Growing financial institutions use Casap to scale with a triple shield—back-office efficiencies, fraud protection, and consumer delight. To learn more, visit View source version on Contacts MEDIA CONTACT: Derek HowardOn behalf of Casapderek@ 678-781-7215 Sign in to access your portfolio
Forbes
07-08-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Everyone Hates Credit Card Disputes. This Fintech Is Using AI To Fix That.
If you've ever had to dispute a charge on your credit or debit card, there's a good chance you walked away disgruntled. Americans filed 50,000 complaints with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) related to card disputes over the past year. Now a three-year-old startup is using AI to make banks better at handling such disputes. Casap has just raised $25 million in new funding at a $105 million valuation, the company shared exclusively with Forbes . Silicon Valley venture firm Emergence Capital led the financing, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, Primary Venture Partners and SoFi also invested. The startup's software acts as a system of record and tracking tool for the surprisingly complex, highly regulated worlds of credit and debit card disputes. The resolution of disputes is a drawn-out, opaque ordeal involving a back-and-forth between a consumer, his or her bank and a merchant. Disputes often take an excruciating 45 to 90 days to resolve and can cause consumers to hate their credit card or debit card bank, at least temporarily. Before starting Casap, which now has 22 employees, cofounder and CEO Shanthi Shanmugam, 31, spent time in the trenches of financial services customer support. Beginning in 2017, she worked for nearly six years as a product manager at Robinhood, which was once notorious for having bare-bones, shoddy customer service. After the GameStop saga in January 2021, when trading in the gaming company was halted due to a flood of trades from Robinhood users, she led Robinhood's launch of 24/7 phone support. In 2022, she led the launch of 24/7 chat support. Shanmugam left Robinood the next year to start Casap. Beyond trying to improve disputes for honest consumers, Casap aims to fight first-party fraud, which means schemes where people commit fraud under their own names. A typical example: Your neighbor has buyer's remorse over a TV he ordered from Best Buy, so he files a phony dispute saying he never received it. First-party fraud costs businesses an estimated $100 billion a year, according to fraud prevention firm Socure. To help banks, Casap's software flags how many disputes a customer has previously filed and can send automated emails to serial disputers. Shanmugam explains what the email might say: 'Here are the 10 disputes you filed. Here's what happened and how much money your bank lost. By the way, did you know it's illegal to lie about these things?' Shanmugam calls this a 'rehabilitation email' and says such notes help nudge consumers towards better behavior. Casap has more than 15 customers, including publicly traded fintechs, banks and credit unions like Virginia Beach-based Chartway, with $3.5 billion in assets. Shanmugam is signing up financial institutions in about half the time it typically takes to land one, says Carlotta Siniscalco, a Casap investor and partner at Emergence Capital. It's competing primarily against the big card processors, including FIS, Fiserv and Global Payments-owned TSYS, in addition to 10-year-old, venture-backed company Quavo. Shanmugam says Casap charges less than half of what incumbents charge for dispute management. Her startup's annualized revenue is still quite small at less than $10 million, though it has grown 450% over the past year, the CEO says. Have a story tip? Contact Jeff Kauflin at jkauflin@ or on Signal at jeff.273. S hanmugam grew up in San Jose and went to college at the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in electrical engineering and computer science. She did a short stint at Meta as a product manager in a rotational program and joined Robinhood in 2017, where she helped to launch its first crypto trading feature and worked on stock watchlists before moving into customer support. In June 2022, she reconnected with former Meta colleague Saisi Peter, who was then a product manager at digital bank Chime. Peter was working on Chime's internal tools for managing customer support and disputes. The two saw a pressing need for better tech to manage high-stress customer interactions, since they're critical to building users' loyalty. They incorporated Casap in late December 2022 and left their jobs in February 2023 to work on it full time. Today, credit and debit card disputes are hard to manage largely because they're governed by strict regulation and decades-old processes. For instance, when a customer files a dispute, a financial institution typically has 10 days by law to respond and issue a provisional credit. If a bank decides the consumer's claim is valid, it submits a chargeback to Visa or Mastercard's online systems. Next, the merchant has from 20 to 45 days to respond with its own argument for why the customer shouldn't get a refund. That's why the whole thing can take 90 days. And to add to the pain, while disputes are in motion, they're a black box. Banks usually outsource dispute management, paying $20 to $40 per dispute, Shanmugam says. When end customers call their bank to ask for an update, banks themselves have little visibility into a dispute's status, leaving everyone frustrated. S hanmugam and Peter have designed Casap to work like a fraud investigator. When consumers start a dispute, Casap's software asks detailed questions, trying to understand what really happened with the transaction and to assess whether the complaining purchaser is being honest. Sometimes Casap encourages consumers to resolve the problem directly with the merchant instead of filing a dispute with their bank, especially if its data shows the person has made other recent purchases at that merchant. After consumers click submit on a dispute, Casap's AI analyzes their responses and spits out a probability score for the bank's operations staff, predicting how likely the merchant will be to cough up the refund. If that probability is high, the bank can instantly issue a refund to the consumer, since it now has more confidence it will be made whole. As a dispute progresses, the merchant's side of the story might come back in a tedious, 50-page document. Casap runs the seller's response through its own AI and generative AI models from OpenAI and Google to summarize and evaluate its validity. Additionally, Casap takes a cue from Domino's beloved pizza-delivery tracker and provides a status update page for consumers on where the dispute stands. Rob Keatts, an executive vice president at Chartway, says it used to take the credit union 90 days to resolve disputes. Now with Casap, it takes 23 days on average. The next product Shanmugam wants to launch is a 'FICO score for first-party fraud,' or a way to help banks predict whether a given dispute is fraudulent. To do that, Casap would have to develop a database that links consumers' history across different financial institutions. The market for that service could be even bigger, since Shanmugam thinks Casap could sell it to both financial institutions and merchants. So far, not many startups are going after the same market as Casap: helping banks with disputes. Many more have popped up to help merchants with disputes, such as Riskified, Signifyd and Justt, likely because it's a much bigger pool of customers–there are tens of millions of merchants in America compared with thousands of financial institutions. More from Forbes Forbes Inside Robinhood's Crypto-Fueled Plan For World Domination By Nina Bambysheva Forbes Why JPMorgan Is Hitting Fintechs With Stunning New Fees For Data Access By Jeff Kauflin Forbes Credit Card Giant Synchrony's Earnings Show U.S. Consumer 'In Pretty Good Shape'–As Long As Inflation Doesn't Spike By Jeff Kauflin Forbes How Small Business Can Survive Google's AI Overview By Brandon Kochkodin Forbes How Scrubbing Your Social Media Could Backfire–And Even Hurt Your Job Prospects By Maria Gracia Santillana Linares Forbes The Treasury Is Sitting On A $750 Billion Gold Hoard Officially Valued At $11 Billion By Brandon Kochkodin
Boston Globe
16-04-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Trump doesn't care about domestic terrorism — unless Teslas are the victims
With his alleged white supremacist, anti-government views, Casap fits the profile of someone whose name might have been in the national domestic terrorism database — that is, if such a thing still existed. Last month, the Trump administration Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up This came at a time when incidents of targeted violence and terrorism were surging, according to a statement from the now-defunct Advertisement The project Advertisement When it comes to domestic terrorism these days, the Trump administration's top priority seems to be protecting Teslas. In what appeared to be a protest against unelected Elon Musk's dismantling of the federal government, some Tesla In a post on his social media site, the president even suggested that the perpetrators, who he called 'sick terrorist thugs,' should serve 20 years in the same Gulag-style prison in El Salvador where hundreds of immigrants abducted from this country — the Last month, Bondi made this comment days before the terrorism and targeted violence project was discontinued. Dating back to his first term, Trump established what has been a persistent theme in his political life: a complete disregard for domestic terrorism, the vast majority of which is committed by white far-right extremists. In 2017, he defended neo-Nazis at the Charlottesville, Va., hate rally where Advertisement When asked during a presidential debate in 2020 whether he condemned the Proud Boys, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group, he instead said, 'Proud Boys — And in one of Trump's most damning actions since returning to the White House, he issued At every turn, Trump has given aid and comfort to this democracy's greatest enemies. Casap's alleged actions would seem to meet the definition of domestic terrorism, but Trump has had nothing to say about it. That includes the fact that the suspect's manifesto is reportedly rife with praise for Adolf Hitler and other antisemitism — which Trump falsely claims to care so much about. With similar cases, there's been a tendency to classify suspects as lone wolves, but in the darkest corners of the internet, dens of such wolves lie in wait. Now, instead of shining a light in those hidden places and restoring efforts to track extremist groups or individuals potentially plotting violent acts, Trump is standing back, standing by, and saying nothing. Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
A 'neo-Nazi' allegedly planned to kill Trump. Federal cuts could slow foiling similar plots.
A newly unsealed affidavit from the FBI alleges that a Wisconsin teenager charged with killing his parents earlier this year also appears to be a white supremacist who plotted to set off a race war by assassinating President Donald Trump. The affidavit alleges 17-year-old Nikita Casap of Waukesha, Wisconsin, killed his parents in February to "obtain the financial means and autonomy necessary" to carry out his plan of killing the president. He hoped the assassination would cause the United States to collapse, an outcome he claimed was necessary to topple the 'Jewish occupied' government and save the white race, according to a document the FBI referred to as Casap's "manifesto." The affidavit alleges Casap partially paid for 'a drone with a dropping mechanism' to inflict harm by dropping 'an explosive, Molotov cocktail, or very strong topical poison' on a target. According to messages referenced in the affidavit, Casap has links to multiple white supremacist groups. In messages on TikTok and Telegram, he identified himself as a follower of the Order of Nine Angles, which the FBI describes as a neo-Nazi cult that 'advocates for the use of violence and terrorism to overthrow governments and destroy modern civilization," NBC News reported. In his so-called manifesto, he appeared to recommend readings from the Terrorgram Collective, a global white supremacist group known for carrying out acts of violent racism and anti-LGBTQ bigotry. (Casap's attorneys did not immediately respond to NBC News' request for comment.) Instances of white supremacists attempting to incite a race war have occurred with disturbing frequency. In 2023, Rachel Maddow spoke with extremism expert Kathleen Belew about why neo-Nazi groups believe they can trigger a race war by attacking U.S. infrastructure such as electricity substations. Last June, I wrote about the FBI foiling an Arizona man's alleged plot to spark a race war by shooting up a rap concert in Atlanta. It's not hard to see why federal law enforcement officers have, in recent years, warned that white supremacy domestic terrorism is one of the biggest threats to national security. It's why many extremism experts have been taken aback by the Trump administration's moves to slash tens of millions of dollars for programs that track and combat domestic terrorism. Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit watchdog Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told The Guardian last month that such cuts could have disastrous impacts. 'Without this research, we won't know the extent of the problems we face when it comes to domestic terrorism, nor how to mitigate them,' Beirich said. 'And it will leave a huge hole in our knowledge base going forward — one that recent work and attention was trying to address. We will all suffer for the loss of this work.' This article was originally published on
