Solving the $100B First-Party Fraud Problem, Starting With Disputes

I’m thrilled to get to report this live from Money20/20 as Shanthi Shanmugam and Saisi Peter get ready to go onstage for a showcase of this year’s most exciting new startups.

The pair are here to officially unveil what they’ve been quietly working on over the last year: Casap, an AI-powered copilot and collaboration platform to automate dispute management, reduce fraud loss, and improve customer experience for banks, credit unions, and fintechs. Along with it comes a proprietary “first-party fraud score”—similar to an industry-standard FICO score—and the ability to resolve a dispute end-to-end without human intervention. (The announcement was also covered in Axios this morning.)

This moment has been a long time coming, as Primary led Casap’s pre-seed funding. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the seed round, bringing total funding to $8.5 million. Coinvestors include Curql, Alloy Labs, Commerce Ventures, and several notable fintech founders. Their current product, an end-to-end platform to help manage all internal, merchant, and customer facing coordination of disputes management, has clearly struck a chord in the market – but this is just the tip of the iceberg for what’s to come.

Casap x Primary

We initially met Shanthi and Saisi before they even quit their day jobs at Robinhood and Chime respectively. The pair were longtime friends who had initially met in Facebook's RPM program. They both moved on to successful careers at generation-defining fintech companies, where they drove initiatives to tackle the growing support problems with operational efficiencies. Realizing this was a broader problem and that the current legacy solutions were not only expensive but also led to a subpar customer experience, the duo teamed up to launch Casap and started working on it in their spare time. When our team met them, we were immediately struck by their passion, expertise, and vision. We saw this was a universal problem faced by fintechs and traditional financial institutions and that existing solutions offered expensive, subpar experiences for both internal operations teams and end users. We soon committed to leading the pre-seed even though Shanthi and Saisi had yet to quit their day jobs.

The first modern platform for disputes and first-party fraud

Casap enters the market at a time when first-party fraud (i.e. “friendly fraud”) and in particular disputes are skyrocketing since COVID, costing over $100B a year. Consumers are increasingly disputing legitimate purchases to avoid payment, and increasingly do it directly with their card issuers instead of merchants.

Enter Casap’s end-to-end platform that drives immediate results — Chartway Credit Union, for example, delivers 29% cost savings from day one, with further savings just a month later. And integration timelines are 4x faster than competitors in the space.

The self-service flow turns what has been a negative experience into a loyalty-building experience. Built-in regulatory expertise and network integrations pair with an AI-powered decision engine, helping institutions recoup dollars as well as internal bandwidth, plus learn patterns of fraud for evidence that wins more chargebacks.

Casap is pioneering an entirely new chargeback model that includes publicly available weights alongside built-in regulatory expertise, integrations, and advanced AI decisioning capabilities that cut resolution times from days to minutes.

It’s been an honor to watch Shanthi and Saisi expertly wield deep domain and product expertise alongside relentless execution to quickly go from an idea to a product that is resonating with marquee customers across modern fintech companies and traditional financial institutions. The momentum of the business is world class for a company of their stage and scale. We’re so excited to welcome our friends at Lightspeed to the journey and we can’t wait to see what they’ll do with the extra firepower.