BioCatch Sold to Visa for $2.4 Billion. The Lesson Is Not the Technology.

$7 million in annual revenue to $100 million in ARR. A company worth around $100 million turned into a $2.4 billion acquisition by Visa.

Everyone is about to talk about the BioCatch exit. I want to talk about what happened before the exit, because that is the part founders and CEOs can actually learn from.

BioCatch had great technology for years. Founded in 2011, it built behavioral biometrics: AI and machine learning that detect fraud from how people actually interact with their devices. Genuinely impressive tech. But great technology on its own does not create a $2.4 billion company.

The interesting part is what happened when the business scaled. According to CTech, BioCatch was doing around $7 million a year and was valued at roughly $100 million when Gadi Mazor took over. By 2023, ARR had hit $100 million, growing 49% that year.

Today BioCatch serves more than 350 banks across 21 countries, including over 100 of the world's largest. It protects 760 million users and 1.8 billion devices.

That is the story I care about.

The founder who can talk for three hours about the product

As a fractional CRO and business consultant, I meet these founders constantly. They are obsessed with the product. They will spend three hours walking you through the technology, every feature, every edge, every reason it beats anything else on the market.

Then I start asking about sales.

Who exactly buys this? Why do they buy? How do you reach them? What is the sales process? How long is the cycle? Who are the real decision makers? Why do you win? Why do you lose? Can anyone other than you sell it? Can you predict next quarter?

Suddenly the answers get a lot less impressive.

Building it and selling it are two different skills

Building something great is brutally hard. Turning it into something that hundreds of enterprise customers around the world buy, again and again, is an entirely different skill. Most technical founders are world-class at the first and have never been taught the second.

And that second skill is what scale actually means.

Not one giant customer. Not one great quarter. Not a big funding round or a flattering valuation on a slide.

Scale is a repeatable commercial machine: something that finds customers, closes them, keeps them, and does it again across markets and segments without the founder in every deal.

BioCatch built that machine. Visa just put a $2.4 billion price tag on it.

Another remarkable Israeli success story, and another reminder that Israel does not only produce brilliant technology. At our best, we know how to turn that technology into global businesses. 🇮🇱

Your product is not your company

The takeaway for the rest of us is simple and a little uncomfortable: your product is not your company. Your ability to sell it, repeatedly and predictably, is.

If you can talk for three hours about your technology and then stumble on "why do you lose deals," that gap is the most valuable thing you can fix. And you can fix it long before any exit is on the table, by building the sales engine and the team that runs it, not by waiting for a buyer to notice you.