Casap x Emergence
First-party fraud now accounts for 36% of all reported fraud, up from 15% two years ago, according to a Cornerstone Advisors survey of 416 bank and credit union executives. It doesn’t show up at login. It shows up weeks later, in the dispute queue, where nobody designed the team to carry it. In August 2025, when we led Casap’s $25M Series A, first-party fraud was growing 2.5x year-over-year, and banks were drowning in manual claims and Reg E deadlines.
I wrote down a 3 step process: start with disputes, earn trust, expand upstream. Banks and credit unions are the most cautious buyers in software, in the most regulated corner of the bank. We believed Casap could earn their trust, but we didn’t expect them to do so in 14 months.
One year later, Casap now works with more than 100 banks, credit unions, fintechs, and processors, and has grown revenue 10x.
Casap just announced a $56M Series B, and we’re investing again.
The playbook, one year in
We backed Casap with dispute resolution as the way in. I’ve worked closely with the founders Shanthi Shanmugam and Saisi Peter since that first check, and the last year proved the importance of three things:
- Start by tackling the hardest workflow. Disputes have everything that makes banking operations hard: regulatory clocks, real money moving, an upset customer on the other end, and evidence scattered across a half-dozen systems. Casap’s agents now run the full dispute lifecycle, from intake through investigation, decisioning, recovery, and the customer conversation. The results: a 96% chargeback win rate against a 60% industry average. Resolution in 8 days instead of up to 90. Human time per case is down from 45 minutes to 1-2 minutes. Agents resolve 73% of cases on their own, but people still make the calls that need judgment.
- Build with the people who do the work, and follow their rules. Before writing a line of code, the Casap team sat with the employees buried in manual dispute work and learned how the job actually gets done. Casap’s agents also run on each institution’s own policies, inside the systems it already uses, and every decision comes with evidence and an audit trail. Nobody on the operations team has to become a technologist to use it. In fintech, you must move fast, but you cannot break things, or you lose trust.
- Earn trust, and the next job follows. Casap always meant to go beyond disputes. Win there, and every workflow after it is a smaller lift. But customers are driving its expansion. The same institutions that started with disputes are now bringing Casap into fraud, collections, claims, and complex exceptions. Synchrony, the largest U.S. private-label card issuer, is working with Casap to bring agents into more of the bank. In financial services, nobody buys a second product from a vendor they don’t trust.
What we’re watching
The AI that helps Casap resolve a dispute in minutes can help a fraudster fake one in seconds. And as agents start buying for us, “I didn’t make that purchase” is getting harder to judge. Fraud is now an AI versus AI problem. That’s why the next workflows matter more than the next customer. Today, a customer who disputes a charge, misses a payment, and files a claim in close succession shows up as three unrelated tickets. When Casap runs all three, it sees one customer, and can tell who is in real hardship from who is gaming the system. That’s the compounding dataset I wrote about in Disrupting Data Monopolies last July, showing up on schedule.
As Shanthi puts it, “If all we get from the agentic era is the same outcomes happening faster, we’ve missed a huge opportunity.” The signal we’re watching is whether Casap’s agents can reason, act, and coordinate across all of these systems end to end, and deliver outcomes banks couldn’t reach before.
Read why we backed Casap from the start here.
