Tunic Pay
Provides an anti-fraud payment intelligence layer to banks and fintechs to prevent authorized push-payment scams.
Website: https://www.tunicpay.com/
Cover Block
Publicly reported
| Name | Tunic Pay |
| Tagline | Provides an anti-fraud payment intelligence layer to banks and fintechs to prevent authorized push-payment scams. |
| Headquarters | London, UK |
| Founded | 2023 |
| Stage | Seed |
| Business Model | B2B |
| Industry | Fintech |
| Technology | AI / Machine Learning |
| Geography | Western Europe |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Co-Founders (2) |
| Funding Label | Seed |
| Total Disclosed | $5,000,000 |
Links
Publicly reported
- Website: https://www.tunicpay.com
- LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/company/tunic-pay
Summary and Signal
Publicly reported Tunic Pay is a London-based fintech building a specialized anti-fraud layer designed to prevent authorized push-payment (APP) scams, a high-volume fraud category where customers are tricked into authorizing payments to criminals [PowerGame, September 2026]. The company's focus on this specific, costly problem within the real-time payments ecosystem, combined with a founding team that has previously scaled venture-backed fintechs, positions it as a targeted bet on a growing regulatory and commercial pain point for banks.
The company was founded in 2023 by repeat entrepreneurs Nicky Goulimis and Nico Barawid. Goulimis was previously COO of Nova Credit, a cross-border credit infrastructure company that raised over $150 million, while Barawid founded and led Casai, a Latin American hospitality startup that raised more than $50 million [UK Parliament, May 2025]. Their collective experience in building regulated financial and scaled operational businesses provides a relevant foundation for tackling bank-fintech partnerships.
Tunic Pay's core product, described as a "payment intelligence" layer, aims to verify recipients and add risk signals during the transaction flow, seeking to flag scams before money leaves a customer's account [Capital.gr, September 2026]. The company claims it is the only vendor designed specifically for APP fraud, a differentiation it will need to prove against broader fraud prevention platforms [Fraud Leaders' Summit, retrieved 2026]. It has raised a $5 million seed round from a notable syndicate including LocalGlobe and Flourish Ventures, which the company is using to build its team and pursue initial bank integrations in the UK and US [Startups 100, January 2025].
Over the next 12-18 months, the key milestones to watch are the public announcement of its first named bank or fintech customer, the demonstration of measurable fraud reduction in a live environment, and the expansion of its commercial team as indicated by its open roles in London and New York. The verdict in the Analyst Notes will hinge on whether Tunic Pay can translate its founder pedigree and specific wedge into tangible, scalable commercial contracts.
One source, partially checked -- Core company facts and funding are reported by multiple sources; product claims and team backgrounds are primarily from company materials or single-source corroboration.
Taxonomy Snapshot
| Axis | Value |
|---|---|
| Stage | Seed |
| Business Model | B2B |
| Industry / Vertical | Fintech |
| Technology Type | AI / Machine Learning |
| Geography | Western Europe |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Co-Founders (2) |
| Funding | Seed (total disclosed ~$5,000,000) |
Company Overview
Publicly reported
Tunic Pay was founded in London in 2023 by Nicky Goulimis and Nico Barawid, two repeat entrepreneurs entering the fraud prevention space from adjacent fintech and consumer sectors [Crunchbase, retrieved 2026]. The company is structured as a private limited company headquartered in the UK, though its specific legal entity name is not detailed in public registries. Its formation coincided with a period of heightened regulatory focus on authorized push-payment (APP) scams in the UK, a problem the founders identified as a distinct wedge for a new venture [UK Parliament, May 2025].
Key milestones follow a rapid seed-to-launch cadence typical of venture-backed fintechs. The company secured a $5 million seed round in 2024, attracting a consortium of notable investors including LocalGlobe, Flourish Ventures, and Avid Ventures [Capital.gr, September 2026] [Startups 100, January 2025]. By early 2025, Tunic Pay was publicly described as working with national banks and fintechs, though it has not disclosed specific client names [Startups 100, January 2025]. The most recent public development was the company's participation in a September 2026 meeting in Silicon Valley, where co-founder Nicky Goulimis was among a group of Greek founders who met with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis [PowerGame, September 2026].
One source, partially checked -- Founding details and funding round corroborated by multiple sources; client claims and specific milestone dates rely on company statements or single-source reporting.
The Product and the Stack
Public record plus analysis
Tunic Pay’s platform is a payment intelligence layer designed to intervene before authorized push-payment (APP) scams are completed. The company’s public materials describe a system that verifies recipients and enriches transactions with risk and conditionality signals, aiming to flag suspicious activity while clearing legitimate payments instantly [tunicpay.com, retrieved 2026]. The core capability is real-time assessment at the point of authorization, a shift from post-fraud investigation to pre-emptive blocking [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF].
Publicly stated features include recipient verification, fraud-specific data fields, and dynamic transaction information [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF]. The company claims its architecture is the only vendor solution specifically designed for APP fraud, a point echoed in conference materials and third-party listings [LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] [Fraud Leaders' Summit, retrieved 2026]. Technical stack details are not disclosed, but open engineering roles suggest a focus on scalable data systems and machine learning applications (inferred from job postings) [Cyrus Lyons - Tunic Pay | LinkedIn, retrieved 2026].
One source, partially checked -- Product claims are primarily company-sourced; the APP-specific focus is corroborated by third-party event listings.
The Market They Are Entering
Publicly reported
The market for authorized push-payment fraud prevention is not a speculative niche but a direct response to a multi-billion dollar problem that has crystallized under regulatory pressure, particularly in the UK and increasingly in the US. While Tunic Pay's own market sizing claims are not publicly available from independent sources, the scale of the problem it addresses is documented by regulators and industry bodies, creating a clear demand signal for its purported wedge.
The most concrete public data point comes from UK Finance, which reported that authorized push-payment (APP) fraud losses in the UK totaled £485.2 million in 2022 [UK Finance, July 2023]. This figure, representing only consumer losses and not business losses, establishes a baseline for the economic damage. The regulatory response has been a significant demand driver. The UK's Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) introduced mandatory reimbursement rules for APP scam victims, effective from October 2024, which transfers significant liability to sending payment firms [PSR, June 2023]. This creates a direct financial incentive for banks to invest in prevention, moving fraud from a cost of doing business to a controllable P&L line.
In the United States, the tailwind is more emergent but building. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has issued guidance clarifying that banks may be liable for certain peer-to-peer payment scams under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, and the rise of real-time payment networks like FedNow increases the velocity and irreversibility of fraudulent transactions [CFPB, September 2023]. The adjacent markets for general fraud detection and transaction monitoring are large but not perfectly substitutable; legacy solutions often focus on unauthorized transactions (card fraud) or use behavioral analytics that can miss the social engineering hallmarks of an APP scam, where the customer is knowingly initiating the payment.
A key adjacent market is the broader financial crime compliance sector, which includes anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) solutions. Firms like Quantexa and Featurespace operate in this space. While these tools provide contextual risk scoring, their primary design center is regulatory compliance and detecting criminal networks, not necessarily preventing a one-off scam where the recipient account may be clean. Tunic's claimed differentiation as "the only fraud vendor designed specifically for APP" [Fraud Leaders' Summit] suggests it is targeting a gap within this broader landscape.
One source, partially checked -- Market loss figures are from a single industry report (UK Finance). Regulatory drivers are publicly documented. Adjacent market context is established, but specific TAM/SAM for APP-specific prevention is not independently sourced.
The Competitive Field
Public record plus analysis Tunic Pay enters a crowded financial crime detection market by narrowing its focus to a single, high-stakes problem: authorized push-payment (APP) fraud.
The competitive analysis must therefore rely on a broader mapping of the landscape.
The market for fraud prevention is segmented by problem type and technical approach. Incumbent vendors like Feedzai, Featurespace, and Nethone offer broad fraud and anti-money laundering (AML) platforms that include APP detection as one module among many [Startups 100, January 2025]. These established players benefit from large enterprise contracts and extensive historical data, but their generalized models may not be optimized for the specific social engineering patterns of APP scams. Challenger fintechs often build fraud tools as part of a broader payment or banking stack, such as Plaid's Signal or Truelayer's payment intelligence features. These are typically bundled offerings, not standalone APP-specific products. Finally, adjacent substitutes include manual review teams at banks and basic rule-based systems, which are slow and prone to high false-positive rates.
Tunic's stated edge today is its singular focus. The company claims it is "the only fraud vendor designed specifically for APP" [Fraud Leaders' Summit, retrieved 2026]. This specialization could allow for a more nuanced product and a clearer sales narrative to banks under acute regulatory pressure to reduce APP losses. The founders' prior experience in building regulated fintechs (Nova Credit) and scaling consumer-facing operations (Casai) provides a talent edge in navigating bank procurement and understanding user journeys. However, this edge is perishable. A focused product is only defensible if it demonstrably outperforms broader platforms on accuracy or cost. Incumbents can and likely will build or acquire dedicated APP capabilities, leveraging their existing client relationships to cross-sell.
The company's most significant exposure is its lack of a proprietary data network. Its platform's effectiveness hinges on the quality and uniqueness of its "payment intelligence" and recipient verification data [tunicpay.com, retrieved 2026]. If this data is largely sourced from public or commercially available feeds, larger competitors with greater resources could replicate or outspend Tunic. Furthermore, the company does not yet own a critical channel; it must sell into bank compliance and fraud teams, a sales cycle dominated by relationships that incumbents have cultivated for years. Its current lack of publicly named flagship clients makes this channel challenge more acute.
A plausible 18-month scenario sees the market bifurcating. If regulatory mandates for APP scam reimbursement become stricter and more prescriptive (e.g., requiring specific verification steps), Tunic Pay could be a winner by being the fastest, most compliant solution. Its focused team could iterate rapidly to meet new standards, while larger platforms struggle with legacy codebases. Conversely, if APP fraud simply becomes another checkbox in a broader RFP for a consolidated fraud platform, a challenger like Featurespace could be the winner, leveraging its existing footprint to absorb the APP use case. Tunic would then become an acquisition target for a platform seeking to quickly fill a capability gap, rather than an independent category leader.
One source, partially checked -- Competitive positioning is inferred from company claims and market context; no named competitors are independently verified.
Opportunity
Publicly reported The prize for a company that can systematically reduce authorized push-payment (APP) fraud is a multi-billion dollar market position, defined by regulatory mandate and the direct financial liability of banks.
The headline opportunity for Tunic Pay is to become the default payment intelligence layer for real-time payments in Western regulated markets. This outcome is reachable because the problem is acute, the regulatory environment is forcing action, and the company's founding wedge is precisely aligned with the pressure point. APP fraud, where a customer is tricked into authorizing a transfer to a scammer, accounted for £459.7 million in UK losses in 2023 alone, with banks increasingly liable for reimbursement under new rules [UK Parliament, May 2025]. Tunic's stated focus on verifying recipients and adding risk signals before a transaction is authorized directly addresses this liability shift. If the platform proves effective at scale, it could transition from a point solution for scam prevention into a mandatory component of a bank's payment stack, similar to how anti-money laundering (AML) screening became non-negotiable infrastructure.
Growth from a seed-stage vendor to a category-defining platform would likely follow one of several concrete paths. The following scenarios outline plausible, evidence-supported routes to massive scale.
| Scenario | What happens | Catalyst | Why it's plausible |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regulatory Standard in the UK | Tunic's methodology or data schema is adopted or referenced in UK Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) guidance as a model for APP fraud prevention. | A successful large-scale pilot with a major UK bank, like NatWest or Lloyds, demonstrates material fraud reduction, attracting regulatory attention. | The UK is the global epicenter of APP fraud regulation and Tunic is already engaging with UK institutions; a founder is scheduled for a panel with NatWest Group and national crime agencies [Cyrus Lyons - Tunic Pay |
| Land-and-Expand in US Banking | Tunic becomes the specialist vendor of choice for US regional banks and credit unions seeking to get ahead of potential APP fraud liability. | The company successfully onboards its first named US bank or credit union client, providing a referenceable case study for a market with less mature defenses. | Tunic is actively hiring a US Commercial Associate in New York to launch stateside and pursue engagements with large US banks and credit unions [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF]. |
| Acquisition by a Major Payment Processor | A company like Stripe, Adyen, or a large incumbent fraud vendor acquires Tunic to integrate its APP-specific intelligence into a broader fraud suite. | Tunic achieves product-market fit with several key bank logos but struggles with the capital intensity of a standalone global sales motion. | The founders have prior experience scaling and fundraising for venture-backed companies (Nova Credit, Casai), making them credible acquisition targets for a strategic buyer seeking domain expertise [UK Parliament, May 2025]. |
Compounding success in this market would be driven by a classic data and trust flywheel. Each new bank client processes millions of transactions, generating proprietary data on payment patterns, recipient behaviors, and emerging scam typologies. This data, in turn, would improve the accuracy of Tunic's risk models, creating a performance gap versus new entrants. Furthermore, as the platform identifies more fraudulent payees, it builds a shared, consortium-style threat intelligence network that becomes more valuable with each participant. Early signals of this flywheel are not yet publicly verifiable in live deployments, but the company's positioning as a specialist layer suggests an architectural intent to aggregate cross-institutional insights, a model proven in adjacent areas like credit bureaus and AML.
The size of the win, should a dominant scenario play out, can be framed by looking at comparable companies. For instance, Feedzai, a broader fraud prevention platform, was valued at over $1 billion in its 2021 Series D [Crunchbase]. A company that becomes the de facto standard for a specific, high-liability fraud vector like APP scams could command a significant premium within that valuation range. If Tunic were to capture a material portion of the addressable market in the UK and expand successfully into the US and Europe, a scenario where it reaches a unicorn valuation as an independent company or is acquired for a high multiple of revenue is plausible. This is a scenario-based outcome, not a forecast, but it illustrates the magnitude of the opportunity given the problem's scale and the regulatory tailwinds.
One source, partially checked -- Core market dynamics (regulatory pressure, fraud losses) are corroborated by parliamentary evidence. Company's strategic positioning and growth scenarios are inferred from public hiring plans and founder engagements, but lack independent verification of commercial traction or product efficacy.
Sources
Publicly reported
[PowerGame, September 2026] An. Germanidis, An. Angelopoulos, Sp. Xanthos, N. Goulimis: The 4 Greeks in AI Meet One-on-One with Mitsotakis in Silicon Valley | https://www.powergame.gr/en/economy/14960/greek-ai-founders-meet-mitsotakis-in-silicon-valley/
[UK Parliament, May 2025] Written evidence AIFS0075 | https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/140324/pdf/
[Capital.gr, September 2026] Οι 4 Έλληνες founders της AI που μίλησαν με τον Κ. Μητσοτάκη στο Σαν Φρανσίσκο | https://www.capital.gr/politiki/4018530/oi-4-ellines-founders-tis-ai-pou-milisan-me-ton-k-mitsotaki-sto-san-francisko/?amp=true
[Startups 100, January 2025] Tunic Pay - the new safety net to support scam victims | https://startups.co.uk/startups-100/2025/tunic-pay/
[Crunchbase, retrieved 2026] Tunic Pay - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tunic-pay
[tunicpay.com, retrieved 2026] About | Tunic Pay | https://www.tunicpay.com/about
[tunicpay.com, retrieved 2026] Tunic Pay | Real-time payment intelligence | https://www.tunicpay.com/
[LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] Tunic Pay | LinkedIn | https://uk.linkedin.com/company/tunic-pay
[Fraud Leaders' Summit, retrieved 2026] Tunic Pay is the only fraud vendor designed specifically for APP. | https://www.fraudleaders.com/ (URL not directly provided; source referenced in structured facts)
[Cyrus Lyons - Tunic Pay | LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] Engineer (Engineering) , Unknown | https://lnkd.in/e4jQsBPr
[PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF, retrieved 2026] Tunic Pay is a London fintech founded in 2023 by repeat entrepreneurs Nicky Goulimis and Nico Barawid. | (Source is a research brief; no direct URL provided for the specific snippet)
[UK Finance, July 2023] Annual Fraud Report 2023 | https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/system/files/2023-07/Annual%20Fraud%20Report%202023_0.pdf
[PSR, June 2023] Policy Statement PS23/3: Fighting authorised push payment fraud: a new reimbursement requirement | https://www.psr.org.uk/media/znl4vq5x/ps23-3-fighting-authorized-push-payment-fraud-a-new-reimbursement-requirement.pdf
[CFPB, September 2023] CFPB Issues Guidance to Address Zombie Debt, Overdraft Fees, and Personal Payment Apps | https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-issues-guidance-to-address-zombie-debt-overdraft-fees-and-personal-payment-apps/
Articles about Tunic Pay
- Tunic Pay's $5 Million Seed Wires a Fraud Layer Into Real-Time Payments — The London fintech, founded by repeat operators from Nova Credit and Casai, is betting its specific focus on authorized push-payment scams is a wedge into major banks.