How BioCatch Ended Up in Front of Visa, Years Before the $2.4 Billion Deal

By Jules Berger

On the third of August, 2026, Visa announced it would acquire Tel Aviv-based BioCatch for $2.4 billion. Back in 2015, when BioCatch was still an early-stage startup, it was one of the companies we surfaced for Visa in Israel. That early introduction serves as a perfect case study in the long-term impact of corporate scouting, and how we help facilitate connections that drive billion-dollar value.

Behavioural biometrics, analysing how users physically interact with their devices, is now core infrastructure for the payments industry. Visa's $2.4 billion, all-cash acquisition of BioCatch, announced in early August and expected to close by early 2027, makes that official. BioCatch today protects around 760 million users across 1.8 billion devices and works with more than 350 financial institutions.

Congratulations to the entire BioCatch team on a landmark moment for the company and for Israeli fraud-prevention technology.

How Visa first met BioCatch

In 2015, Visa came to Axis Innovation to help it engage with the Israeli startup ecosystem. The head of Visa in Israel had spent time at Axis Tel Aviv and left with a specific need: real, on-the-ground coverage of a fast-moving ecosystem, paired with an event that could put financial-services leaders, investors and startups in the same room to drive actionable solutions.

Most firms are built to do one of those things well, either, deep local scouting or high-level convening. We were built to do both, and that combination earned us the mandate.

So we designed and ran a custom programme for Visa. We mapped the market against Visa's priorities, screened more than 250 startups, and selected a shortlist of roughly 20 finalists to present at the Visa Innovation Exchange in Tel Aviv, an early marker of Visa's innovation presence in the country. BioCatch, then still early-stage, was one of the companies our process surfaced, who then presented to a panel of global cyber and payments experts.

Eleven years later, that early-stage startup is a $2.4 billion Visa acquisition.

That gap is worth sitting with. Visa didn't just need good technology; it needed a company that could operate at global scale — and over that decade BioCatch earned exactly that, building momentum and winning financial institutions around the world until it had grown into an ideal partner for Visa.

We're not claiming credit for BioCatch's success, that belongs to the team that built the company over more than a decade. But our process does something specific and valuable, it puts the right company in front of the right corporate buyer, early. The pilots, the partnerships, the eventual acquisition, all of it starts with being in the room.

Why this isn't a one-off

If BioCatch were the only example, it would be a nice anecdote. However, the same approach, narrow the field to the few companies that matter and then pushing towards a real outcome, has drawn results across our work:

• Ford. Over a seven-year partnership (2015–2022) running Ford's MakeItDriveable programme, we sourced 3,000+ startups across 20+ countries, engaged 24 business units, and ran 30+ events. Over a dozen of the solutions created have gone live in Ford production vehicles.

• Ibex Investors. As an early Israeli dealflow partner, we helped source companies for a fund that now manages over $1B, feeding a portfolio with multiple exits and IPOs, including Zimperium ($525M), Glassbox ($500M) and Gauzy ($244M).

• WayCare / State of Nevada. A US public-sector road-safety challenge led to a WayCare pilot, statewide rollout, $10M raise, and an exit to Rekor.

• CEVT (Geely). The scouting partnership produced a first pilot and then CEVT opened a permanent office in Israel to stay close to the ecosystem, about the clearest sign a programme is doing its job.

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What actually makes the difference

Innovation teams tend to spend most of their energy on scouting and very little on adoption. We think it should be the reverse. A pilot nobody in the business asked for is dead on arrival, no matter how good the startup is. The work that creates value is evaluating thousands of startups and finding the handful that are relevant, viable and ready for a roadmap, followed by the unglamorous work of getting them from a demo to a deal.

That's the whole model, across three steps:

• Identify — map the technology landscape against a company's real priorities, so it can see the genuine opportunities instead of the noise.

• Evaluate — pressure-test every option for strategic, commercial and technical fit before it ever reaches the client's team.

• Engage — move from exploration to execution: pilots, partnerships and investment that produce measurable results.

  
  

Congratulations again to BioCatch and Visa. We're proud to have been a small, early part of the journey.

Axis Innovation is a venture-clienting and technology-scouting partner. We help innovation teams, business units and corporate development groups find, validate and engage emerging technology sourced globally, with deep roots in the Israeli ecosystem.