Blockchain giant Chainalysis will be acquiring Israeli fraud prevention company Alterya, they announced on Monday. This is the second acquisition the company has made in Israel after it acquired Hexagate just last month.
Chainalysis develops analytics, operations analysis, and data accessibility products on blockchain, employs over 700 employees worldwide, and its customers include financial institutions, governments, and law enforcement agencies.
Alterya was founded in 2022 by Elad Fox (CEO) and Shachaf Gonen (VP of Technology). Fox is a veteran of technology and operational units in the Israeli Intelligence Service, and Gonen is a graduate of the Talpiot Program and served in Unit 8200. He previously worked at Google.
Upon its establishment, the company raised a seed investment of $9.8 million, led by Battery Ventures and with participation from Nyca, NFX, and Y Combinator.
The company currently has 28 employees who will continue to work for it after the acquisition. It will operate as an independent product line and a local R&D center.
“There is a high level of synergy between the technologies built by both companies, and we expect the merger to lead to rapid growth, deepening value for existing customers and expanding operations into new markets,” Fox said. “Social engineering fraud has become the biggest problem for financial services around the world, which strive to adopt faster and more efficient payment infrastructures.”
Real-time fraud prevention
Indeed, Alterya is a real-time fraud prevention company that emphasizes crypto payments and other instant payment methods. It focuses on early detection of social engineering scams, a threat that has grown steadily as attackers increasingly use Gen AI technologies to build synthetic identities and content designed to defraud end customers.
The company has developed a solution that combines cyber capabilities with artificial intelligence to detect these scams early and broadly.
Alterya, which has operated under the radar until now, has experienced rapid growth since launching its product about a year and a half ago. The company helps some of the world’s largest financial institutions, including Coinbase, Square, Binance, and leading US banks, protect hundreds of millions of end customers from fraud.
In 2024, the company detected over $10 billion in crypto fraud in real time and helped its customers protect over $100 million in assets.
“With this acquisition, Chainalysis can now provide proactive real-time fraud protection for payments and enhanced fraud detection during the KYC (know your customer) process for exchange, blockchain, and wallet providers,” explained Chainalysis Co-founder and CEO Jonathan Levin. “Alterya has already helped the world’s leading crypto exchanges reduce fraud by tens of percent and streamline manual investigation processes.”