South African artificial intelligence firm Locstat has raised €2.5 million, equivalent to approximately R50 million at current exchange rates, in a pre-Series A funding round to propel its market penetration in the United Kingdom and the European Union, while fortifying its African operations. Founded in 2016, the company develops graph-powered AI and event processing tools that enable the continuous analysis and visualisation of real-time and static data from varied sources, as outlined in Disrupt Africa. This capital will facilitate enhanced brand recognition, revenue generation, and partnership development in emerging markets, alongside team expansion and network strengthening in South Africa.
Locstat’s platform uncovers concealed insights by scrutinising data interconnections, thereby enhancing datasets for sharper analytics and decision-making. It powers essential functions like fraud detection, customer pathway analysis, rules automation, and geo-spatial processing, all in real time. Conceived to decipher expansive, swift, and interlinked datasets, Locstat has established strong product-market alignment in African financial services. It empowers banks and fintech entities to counter fraud, fortify anti-money laundering and compliance measures, and elevate customer value via interconnected intelligence, according to Crunchbase.
Building on successes across Africa, Locstat now targets European scaling to amplify its brand, income, and collaborations, while nurturing its domestic team and alliances. The funding comes from the Portugal Gateway Fund (PGF) and ANZA Capital. As lead investor, PGF champions growth-stage firms with robust technologies and worldwide prospects. Erik van Veen, general partner at PGF, voiced delight in backing Locstat’s skilled leadership and superior graph database innovations, confident in its European expansion and trajectory towards a Series A in the next two years.
Locstat’s co-founder and chief executive, Ryno Goosen, described the technology’s purpose as transforming intricate, connected data into impactful decisions. This funding propels a battle-tested South African solution—refined in Africa’s challenging transactional settings—into new markets with urgency. Initiatives encompass team augmentation, partner ecosystem enhancement, and platform evolution, allowing clients to spot risks promptly, respond nimbly, and derive value beyond legacy systems’ capabilities. Amid Africa’s tech sector drawing over $1.5 billion in the first half of 2025, with AI a key driver, Locstat’s financial security focus aligns with escalating cyber risks, where worldwide fraud costs could surpass $10 trillion yearly by 2025’s end, as per Forbes analyses. Spanning African innovation to European horizons, the startup highlights the burgeoning transcontinental surge in AI-fintech advancements.