Darktrace vs BioCatch

By valuation, Darktrace is the larger company at $5.3B versus $1.3B — a 4.1x difference. Size can also be measured by team: Darktrace employs 1000-5000 people while BioCatch has 100-500 employees.

Darktrace has raised more in total funding at $230M, compared to BioCatch's $213M — a gap of $17M. Combined, the two companies have completed 3 known funding rounds.

Darktrace leads with an Awaira Score of 85/100, while BioCatch sits at 80/100. That 5-point gap reflects real differences in funding, scale, and traction — it's not a vanity metric.

Darktrace was founded by Poppy Gustafsson in 2013. BioCatch was founded by Avi Turgeman in 2011. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

Darktrace: Darktrace is an AI cybersecurity company that applies unsupervised machine learning to detect and respond to cyber threats inside enterprise networks, email systems, cloud environments, and operational technology. The Cambridge-based company pioneered the concept of the enterprise immune system, training AI models on each organisation normal network behaviour to identify anomalies that indicate intrusion, insider threat, or ransomware activity in real time without requiring predefined threat signatures.\n\nThe company went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2021, raising approximately $230 million in its IPO after backing from Invoke Capital, Vitruvian Partners, and KKR. Darktrace reports over 9,000 enterprise customers across more than 100 countries, including significant deployments in financial services, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. The company has expanded from network detection to autonomous response capabilities through its Antigena product, which can quarantine infected systems and neutralise threats without human intervention.\n\nDarktrace competes in the AI-native cybersecurity market against CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and Microsoft Defender, as well as against SIEM vendors including Splunk and IBM QRadar. The company valuation and public market performance have been volatile, reflecting broader uncertainty around AI cybersecurity spending cycles and questions about autonomous response effectiveness in complex enterprise environments. Its AI self-learning approach, applied consistently across network, email, cloud, and OT security, remains a distinctive architecture compared to detection-rule-based competitors, and the Poppy Gustafsson leadership profile has made Darktrace a flagship case study for UK technology entrepreneurship. BioCatch: BioCatch provides behavioural biometrics and fraud prevention AI that analyses how users physically interact with digital devices — mouse movements, typing cadence, touch pressure, and navigation patterns — to authenticate genuine users and detect account takeover, social engineering, and application fraud in real time during banking and financial transactions. The Tel Aviv company processes behavioural signals from hundreds of millions of user sessions monthly, building individual profiles that flag deviations indicating fraud.\n\nThe company raised approximately $213 million in venture funding including a Series D led by Tiger Global, reaching a valuation exceeding $1 billion. BioCatch counts over 30 tier-one banks globally among its clients including American Express, NatWest, and Lloyds Banking Group, with deployments protecting online banking and mobile banking sessions from fraud that bypasses traditional authentication controls. The platform is particularly effective against malware-assisted fraud and social engineering scams where the genuine account holder is unknowingly manipulated.\n\nBioCatch competes in the behavioural biometrics and fraud intelligence market alongside ThreatMetrix (now LexisNexis Risk Solutions), Sift, and Sardine, as well as traditional fraud management platforms from FICO and SAS. Its differentiation is the depth of its behavioural feature engineering from passive interaction signals that do not require active user participation, creating a fraud layer that operates continuously without adding friction to legitimate user journeys. The growing prevalence of authorised push payment fraud and social engineering attacks in European banking has expanded the relevant use case for BioCatch beyond traditional account takeover detection.

BioCatch got there first, launching in 2011 — that's 2 years of extra runway. Darktrace didn't arrive until 2013. In AI, that kind of head start means more training data, deeper customer relationships, and a bigger talent moat.

Darktrace has about 1000-5000 employees; BioCatch has about 100-500. A bigger team usually means more revenue or heavier VC backing, but in AI, small teams can build at massive scale.

Yes — they're direct rivals. Both Darktrace and BioCatch compete in AI Security, targeting many of the same buyers. If you're evaluating one, you should be looking at the other.