Visa Buys BioCatch for $2.4B in One of Israel's Largest Tech Exits
Visa agreed to pay $2.4B in cash for the Israeli behavioural-biometrics and financial-crime-prevention company — among the largest Israeli tech transactions to date.
Visa has agreed to acquire BioCatch, an Israeli behavioural-biometrics and financial-crime-prevention company, for $2.4 billion in cash. The deal, reported in the August 7 edition of the Firgun newsletter, ranks among the largest Israeli tech transactions on record and stands as the headline exit in a week that otherwise belonged to early- and growth-stage rounds.
BioCatch builds behavioural biometrics and financial-crime-prevention technology. Gadi Mazor heads the team recognized in the newsletter for the transaction.
No lead investor applies here — this is an acquisition, not a venture round, and the newsletter lists no syndicate, valuation or financing terms beyond the $2.4 billion cash consideration. The source similarly does not detail what Visa intends to do with the business after closing, so the strategic rationale stops at the price and the cash structure.
The size is the story. The same newsletter notes that smaller transactions have dominated Israeli tech exits: between 2016 and 2025, acquisitions below $20 million consistently made up roughly 60% to 70% of all exits. A $2.4 billion cash purchase sits at the opposite end of that distribution, and the newsletter flags it as one of the largest exits the country has produced.
It also dwarfs the week's venture activity. Israeli startups announced at least $314 million in disclosed funding across cyber, travel, healthtech and enterprise AI, plus an undisclosed strategic investment. Zenity led with a $115 million Series C plus $10 million in secondary sales to secure AI agents in the enterprise; Oligo Security raised $60 million for runtime protection; Faye took $50 million; QuantHealth $45 million; JUNE AI $20 million; UNIT AI $12 million; Arrakis Security emerged from stealth with $8 million; Inevitable AI Group raised $6 million; Marquee $4 million; and Above Security drew a strategic investment of several million dollars from CrowdStrike. The single Visa-BioCatch cheque is roughly seven times the entire disclosed venture total for the week.
The week's other notable exit was Deel's acquisition of Clarity AI, a deepfake-detection and continuous identity-verification startup, for an estimated $40–50 million, folding that capability into Deel's global workforce platform. Unity's $40 million cash sale of Supersonic to Tripledot Studios, Tricentis's purchase of Tabnine and Razer's rescue deal for StreamElements rounded out an unusually active exit slate.
The BioCatch sale lands in a July that saw Israeli startups raise $1.4 billion, pushing disclosed funding for the first seven months of 2026 to $9 billion, per Globes.