Overwatch Raises $15 Million Series A as AI Floods Cybercrime Market

Digital threat detection startup Overwatch has raised a $15 million Series A led by Mouro Capital, with Visa Ventures, Capital One Ventures, PruVen Capital, New Era Capital Partners and Y Combinator also investing, Fortune has exclusively learned.

The New York-based company, cofounded in 2022 by Arjun Bisen and Zara Perumal, builds technology—including AI agents—that helps companies scale their defenses against digital threats. Its customer list reads like a payments and fintech roll call: Visa, Capital One, Cash App, SoFi, Stripe and DoorDash all buy Overwatch's product, preparing for an era of anyone-can-do-it cybercrime.

What does the money buy?

Bisen, a former Australian diplomat who shaped the country's cyber engagement strategy in the 2010s, argues AI has already transformed cybercrime permanently—not at some point in the future. "The chaos of today is underappreciated," Bisen said. "Cybercrime has just become so effective. You see stats that say cybercrime is the third-largest economy in the world after China and the U.S. I don't know if those numbers are accurate, but there's some attempt at quantifying it and it does sound scary. I think it's not fully appreciated by the public."

His core thesis is structural. Cybersecurity, fraud and money laundering have long been treated as separate disciplines inside companies. Bisen says AI-armed attackers have merged them into one operation.

"Digital threats is a broad term because it can mean everything from cyberattacks to fraud to financial crime," said Bisen. "Attackers are using AI to blend all those into one thing. A threat actor doesn't say: 'I'm going to do a cybersecurity exploit.' They say: 'I'm going to smash and grab, move money away.' These silos of cybersecurity and money laundering and fraud, the idea that those are separate, that's disappeared."

How cheap has attacking become?

The economics of crime have collapsed. Bisen cited a Mastercard statistic that a single attack now costs less than $3 to launch, a price point that turns scamming into a zero-barrier activity.

"As much as we've all seen the scam messages, it's actually way worse than even that suggests," Bisen told Fortune. AI has enabled large-scale impersonation and automated attacks, alongside the familiar SMS phishing and ransomware that predate the AI boom. Fake businesses moving illicit cash add another layer.

The scale is measurable. Bisen described one case that unfolded in under a week.

"One threat actor was able to launch over 100 attack campaigns in like five days, and compromised 27 payment sites," said Bisen. "Then, they basically sat behind those payment sites, skimming all the credit cards that were being used on those sites—and harvesting them. I think they captured all the card details for over 600,000 cards."

Stolen accounts worth millions surface regularly in his work. He has investigated legitimate-looking fronts—bookshop websites, computer repair shops—that traced back to gambling operations and the movement of illegal cash.

Who supplies the criminal ecosystem?

The illicit economy now has its own enterprise software stack, Bisen said. Specialist tools exist for sending scam texts. Other software is built specifically to harvest stolen login credentials.

"Investors always tell me SaaS is dead," said Bisen, "but it's definitely not dead when it comes to the illicit economy."

That criminal tooling market is the mirror image of Overwatch's business: both sides are scaling with AI agents, and defense budgets are following. The Series A signals that payments giants—two of which are investors and several of which are customers—now treat blended cyber-fraud threats as a spending priority rather than a siloed IT problem.

Bisen's bet is that the companies that survive the cheap-attack era will be the ones that stop treating a phished credential, a skimmed card and a laundered payment as three different problems.