ABOUT AURA
We built the infrastructure
we wished existed when
we were on the other side.
Founded
San Francisco · Lagos · Singapore
140+
Countries served
6 continents · 40+ currencies
$84.2B
Volume processed
+12% month over month
What we believe
01
Financial infrastructure should be invisible
until it isn't. Then it should be unbreakable.
The best payment systems are ones you never think about. Every design decision at AURA starts with that premise — not "how do we add a feature" but "how do we make this disappear into the background of your product." When something does go wrong and at scale, it will — you need a system that tells you before your customers do, recovers automatically, and leaves a full audit trail. We build for both ends of that spectrum.
02
Emerging markets aren't a special case.
They're where the next billion transactions
happen.
Most infrastructure is designed in San Francisco for San Francisco. AURA was built by engineers who've processed payments in Lagos, Nairobi, Jakarta, and Karachi where connectivity is intermittent, regulatory frameworks shift fast, and the cost of a failed transaction isn't an inconvenience, it's a business event. First-class support for M-Pesa, PIX, mada, and QRIS isn't an afterthought. It's the foundation.
03
Compliance is not a tax on growth. It's the
architecture that makes growth sustainable.
Every fast-growing fintech eventually hits the same wall: the compliance tooling they bolted on at Series A doesn't scale to Series C volumes. We've seen this pattern enough times to build against it. AURA's compliance layer is embedded at the data model level not layered on top. That means your KYC, AML, and risk posture grow with your transaction volume without manual re-engineering at every inflection point.
The origin
Built by operators.
Not observers.
AURA didn't start as a startup idea. It started as a list of problems. Three of our co-founders spent years inside Stripe, Wise, and Flutterwave building the infrastructure, watching it scale, and cataloguing every point where existing tooling forced workarounds that no team should have to build.
The pattern was always the same: great product teams were spending 30–40% of engineering cycles on payment plumbing, compliance wiring, and fraud tooling that had nothing to do with their actual product. We decided to build the layer that absorbed all of that — once, properly, and for everyone.
We raised our seed from operators who had the same scars. Our Series A came from investors who had backed infrastructure companies long enough to know that the best ones are quiet, reliable, and invisible. That's still the goal.
2021
Founded in San Francisco. First three hires from Stripe Risk and Wise Engineering.
2021
Closed $4.2M seed led by Bedrock Capital. First production payment processed in November.
2022
Lagos office opened. First African payment rail — M-Pesa — live in March. Nairobi corridor followed in June.
2022
Fraud engine v1 launched. 0.08% false positive rate achieved within 90 days of production data.
2023
Raised $28M Series A. Singapore office opened. SEA rails live across 8 markets.
2023
$10B cumulative volume milestone. First enterprise contract signed a $2B AUM neobank.
2024
Analytics platform launched. 140+ countries live. ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certified.
2025
$84.2B cumulative volume. 48-person team across 4 cities. Series B in process.
The team
Eight people.
One obsession.
We hire people who have built the systems we're replacing — not people who've read about them. Every founding team member has shipped production financial infrastructure at scale. Hover to see what they built before AURA.
Daniel Levi
Co-founder & CEO
prev. Stripe
Amara Mensah
Co-founder & CTO
prev. Flutterwave
Kai Patel
Co-founder & CPO
prev. Wise
Sofia Reyes
Head of Risk
prev. Sardine
James Oduya
VP Engineering
prev. Paystack
Lin Nakamura
Head of Compliance
prev. Plaid
Marcus Bell
Head of GTM
prev. Brex
Fatima Ibrahim
Head of Data
prev. Nubank
How we operate
Four principles.
Non-negotiable.
01
Reliability is a feature, not a metric.
We don't chase uptime numbers. We design systems where downtime is structurally improbable. Active-active multi-region, automatic failover, zero scheduled maintenance windows. The SLA is the floor, not the target.
02
Explainability over accuracy alone.
A fraud model that catches 99.3% of fraud is useless if you can't explain why it blocked a transaction. Every AURA decision is auditable, reversible, and decomposable to its contributing signals. No black boxes in production.
04
The customer's compliance is our compliance.
When a regulator asks your team a question, AURA should already have the answer ready. We build audit trails, reporting infrastructure, and documentation as first-class product features — not legal afterthoughts.
We're hiring across engineering, risk, and GTM —
Senior SRE
ML Risk Engineer
Enterprise AE
Compliance Lead
The infrastructure
your platform deserves.
Full fraud engine. Live in your stack today.