Riskified made online stores a simple offer: we judge each order, and if we approve one that turns out to be fraud, we pay for it. Most fraud tools just flagged risky orders and left the merchant to eat the loss. Riskified took the loss on itself. That let stores approve more good customers they would once have turned away. The Tel Aviv company went public in July 2021, and its stock rose 24 percent on day one.

A Guarantee on Every Order

Eido Gal and Assaf Feldman founded Riskified in 2012, with Gal as CEO and Feldman as CTO. The bet was that machine learning could judge online orders better than human reviewers and rigid rules. Riskified charged a fee on each approved order and covered the cost of chargebacks. Large retailers and travel sites signed on, because a declined good customer was a lost sale.

Trading Below Its Price

Riskified priced at $21 a share on July 28, 2021, above its range, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as RSKD. The offering valued it at about $4.3 billion, and the stock closed its first day up 24 percent. It soon fell well below its offer price, along with most 2021 listings. Riskified still trades on the NYSE under RSKD.

Cover: Tight-Rope Walker, Jean Louis Forain. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a tightrope walker (balancing risk).