US blockchain giant Chainasis has announced that it has acquired a Tel Aviv-based startup Alteria. This is the company’s second acquisition in Israel after its acquisition of Hexagate last month. Chainalogy will pay $160 million for Alterya.
Alterya was founded in 2022 by CEO Elad Fox and CTO Shahav Gonen. At its founding, the company raised $9.8 million in seed funding led by Battery Ventures, with participation from NFX, Nyca, and startup accelerator Y Combinator. Alterya and its 28 employees will continue to operate as an independent production line and Israeli R&D center.
Alterya specializes in preventing instant payment (APP) fraud, with a focus on cryptocurrencies and real-time payment networks. The company’s primary focus is on early detection of social engineering scams, which in recent months have increasingly used artificial intelligence to create synthetic identities and content designed to deceive end users.
Alterya has grown rapidly since launching its product 18 months ago. The company serves some of the world’s largest financial institutions, including Coinbase, Square, and Binance, as well as leading US banks. Through these partnerships, Alterya protects hundreds of millions of end customers globally. The company has developed a solution that integrates cybersecurity and artificial intelligence capabilities for large-scale detection across networks, enabling real-time fraud prevention for its customers, even before attackers reach their targets. In 2024, Alterya identified over $10 billion worth of cryptocurrency trades sent to scammers and helped its clients protect over $100 million worth of assets.
“With this acquisition, Chainasis can now provide proactive, real-time fraud protection for payments and enhance fraud detection during the Know Your Customer (KYC) process for exchanges, blockchain and wallet providers,” said Jonathan Levin, CEO and Co-Founder of Chainalogy. “Our acquisition of Alterya represents a Mission Forward in Industry Our work to provide a comprehensive risk solution that includes prevention, compliance and remediation is their mission of protecting humans everywhere from fraud and scams – one of the highest Crypto Crime Categories Annually – An integral part of our mission to build trust in blockchain, we are excited to welcome Alterya to the team and expand our Tel Aviv office to work to protect billions of people from fraud and deliver safer, faster payments to everyone.”
Fox added: “Fraud has become the biggest problem facing financial services around the world, as they struggle to adopt alternative payment infrastructures due to the risks associated with it, especially authorization fraud (scams). This problem has worsened over the past year with the widespread use of Scope for AI Create fake and synthetic digital identities and highly trusted fake content at scale and at low cost, enabling fraudsters to deceive end users and bypass standard verification and fraud detection tools Alterya has developed a solution that introduces a new paradigm in Fraud detection and leveraging artificial intelligence and proprietary cybersecurity tools for early detection at scale to protect individuals and payment services.
Chainalysis, which develops products for blockchain analytics and data accessibility, employs more than 700 people worldwide and serves financial institutions, governments and law enforcement agencies.
Published by Globes, Israel Business News – en.globes.co.il – on January 13, 2025.
© Copyright Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2025.