Bence Jendruszak On Raising $100 Million To Build A Fraud Prevention And Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Platform

In a candid and insightful conversation, Bence Jendruszak, co-founder of a leading fraud prevention company, shared his entrepreneurial journey, offering a blueprint for aspiring founders on scaling a global business, leadership growth, and staying ahead of market trends.

Bence talks about how Seon has offices in four locations worldwide with over 270 employees. It has raised $100M from top-tier investors like Creandum, IVP, Fielder Capital, and PortfoLion Capital Partners.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Bence Jendruszak’s global upbringing instilled adaptability, a critical skill that shaped his entrepreneurial journey and business expansion into the U.S.
• His interest in engineering and logical reasoning inspired him to study economics and later enter the world of cryptocurrency.
• Pivoting from a crypto exchange to fraud prevention, Bence and his team founded Seon to combat online fraud with innovative tools.
• Expanding Seon into the U.S. market required relocating and rethinking the initial approach to achieve growth.
• Scaling from 30 to 300 employees presented challenges, highlighting the importance of structure, process, and experienced leadership.
• Letting go of ego and recognizing when to bring in new leadership was essential to Seon’s continued success.
• Seon’s focus on solving fraud issues has led to impressive growth, raising over $100M and aiming to take the business public.

 

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About Bence Jendruszak:

Bence Jendruszak, based in Austin, TX, US, is currently a Chief Operating Officer at SEON. Fraud Fighters. He brings experience from previous roles at HyperTeam Üzleti és Informatikai Tanácsadó Kft. and HILTI.

Bence Jendruszak holds a 2015 – 2016 European Business School Oestrich-Winkel. With a robust skill set that includes Public Speaking, Microsoft Office, Business Strategy, Strategic Planning, Communication and more.

Connect with Bence Jendruszak:

• LinkedIn
• TheOrg
• Crunchbase
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: alright Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Deal Maker Show. so Today we have a very exciting founder you know founder that they basically is going to tell us a thing or two about building, scaling, and financing a business. you know They’ve accomplished the incredible growth with the business. ah They’ve also raised quite a bit of money. They have offices in four different places around the world with over 270 employees.

Alejandro Cremades: and We’re going to be talking about coming from Europe to the U.S., what that means, and also how to think about scaling, what are some of the issues when you’re scaling, how you think about letting go of your ego, what does it look like when the company’s outgrowing teams, all of the good stuff that we like to hear. so Without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Ben Zendruskak. Welcome to the show.

Bence Jendruszak: Yeah, thanks Alejandro for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here and would love to share any and all ideas I might have.

Alejandro Cremades: um Amazing. so Born in Hungary. I know that thing growing up you moved quite a bit because of your dad’s job. so How was life growing up for you?

Bence Jendruszak: Yeah, it was and was not easy because of my father’s job. He was actually working for GM and we moved a lot around the world moving from Romania to Russia, to Kazakhstan, and then ultimately back to Hungary. And you know, this took, it took a toll on me in the beginning, but generally what I had learned is it’s very, if you can handle naturally stepping out of your comfort zone, that actually becomes a superpower for you after a while. And I’m still sort of like reaping that in my adult life as well. It’s very easy for me to step out of my comfort zone. Hence the reason why I decided to move over to the U S from Hungary, um,

Bence Jendruszak: Last year in the beginning of last year and to support our our us expansion basically It’s allowed me to get comfortable with it and allowed me to you know, when you move from um from Hungary to

Alejandro Cremades: how was How was it for you? I’m sure that it shaped you quite a bit, you know moving around when you were growing up, going from one place to another place, making new friends. How do you think that allowed you to deal with uncertainty?

Bence Jendruszak: to Romania and you don’t speak, you’re like seven years old. You get, you get into a school where they speak English. There’s all these new faces around you. You have no friends and you don’t even speak the language. Um, I mean, you, you pretty much learn to sort of like adapt and sort of adapt to the new environment, make new friends and yeah you know, start surviving. And then that happens three years later. It happens again. And then two years later it happens again.

Bence Jendruszak: um So after a while you treat it as as natural and I guess um I guess I am Like I said even in my adult life like I’m not afraid of change. I know everything’s gonna be fine I can I can adapt pretty quickly to whatever changing environment. I am experiencing

Alejandro Cremades: So then let’s talk about how you developed the law for engineering, maps, physics. you know Where did all all that come from?

Bence Jendruszak: Yeah, I’ve always been a numbers person. So it’s just very logical to me, or at least it seems very logical to me. And I always like to understand why things are happening in the way that they are happening. And I just felt that maths and physics and and science generally are able to describe ah what I am experiencing in the world. And there’s very logical reasoning Behind those so that’s what got me on the path of either You know being an engine becoming an engineer or studying economics and and understanding like the the greater sort of on a grant on a grand scheme of how the world works and I ultimately chose the path of ah Economics and they started studying business and management in university

Alejandro Cremades: So then let’s talk about university because the university in Hungary was quite a pivotal for you. You know, that’s where you met your co-founder and where you guys started to daydream about a future where you could do something together.

Alejandro Cremades: So that eventually got you into cryptocurrency. So walk through us you know walk walk us through what was that the experience like?

Bence Jendruszak: yeah

Alejandro Cremades: how why Why you guys actually connected so well? And and then what did that daydreaming look like?

Bence Jendruszak: Sure. So, Tamash, my co-founder, he is, ah we were good university friends and this was early 2010s. And this was in the, not even the wild West. This was in the time of cryptocurrencies when it was not popular at all. Like, I mean, you could, you could basically, if you researched what it was used for, it was mostly used to and exchange goods and services ah That were related to illicit activities generally. So there was a bunch of dark net markets ah that had relied on on cryptocurrencies and and Bitcoin and they were being shut down and restarted and that was just really interesting to us generally and we thought Why don’t we start a crypto exchange? We truly believed in crypto so we thought like in the future cryptos are gonna be much more popular than they were back then and and And we saw a lot of, the yeah, we just, we we, we just saw an angle there, which was very interesting to us. So we, we wanted to start as a hobby project as we were, you know, having beers after, after school. and We wanted to start a crypto exchange and that’s exactly what we did. And so.

Bence Jendruszak: After starting to accept credit card payments, we recognized that ah we were hit we were being hit with a bunch of fraud, and people are checking out with stolen identities, stolen credit card information, and it’s a major pain. And and so that was no news to us, because even as we were reading these darknet forums ah where they talked about cryptos, it was clear that like um there even the most basic script kiddies could learn to to fraud businesses online.

Bence Jendruszak: um because the tor mo and like the tor usage of the Tor network, um general sort of the wave of cryptos becoming more and more popular um was a perfect inflection point. Like anonymity from all aspects was a perfect inflection point for fraudsters to become to to start doing what they were doing on a larger ah scheme. And so long story short on our crypto ah on our crypto exchange we had to solve the issue of fraud and we said okay let’s put our thinking hats on and let’s start thinking like ah like these fraudsters and how could we actually filter them out and we looked at the marketplace back then of fraud tools there was nothing that we specifically liked everybody was aiming for an enterprise sales motion and we weren’t their ideal customer profile so we started building our own internal fraud tool

Bence Jendruszak: And we started monitoring IP address, whether there’s any VPN or Tor usage as they’re checking out. ah We started monitoring um the email address. We started looking for discrepancies between billing information and and the IP location and such minor sort of trends. And we quickly dived very deep into the intricacies of how fraudsters are thinking. and and the rest is history, I’d say.

Alejandro Cremades: So then what happened next?

Bence Jendruszak: Yeah, we built our own fraud tool and we realized that this this is a problem that’s not gonna be going anywhere. It’s a very sticky issue. Almost every online business is impacted by online fraud. um And we said, okay, we’re gonna pivot, we’re gonna forget about our our crypto exchange and we’re gonna be building a fraud prevention tool from now on. And one day,

Bence Jendruszak: we are going to ah take this business public. And that’s still our aspiration today. And that’s what we’re driving for every day. And we’re, you know, at the same time, we’re helping all of these amazing online businesses to solve their fraud related problems, except on a much ah on a much more professional ah level, you know, eight, nine years later than what we had originally thought we would we would be doing.

Alejandro Cremades: So what what ended up being Ben’s the business model of the company? How do you guys make money for the people that listen you know to get it?

Bence Jendruszak: Yeah, it’s very simple. So there’s various levels of checks that we can support um the businesses that we’re supporting with. So we can monitor fraud at the point of registration, at the logins, at at the point of a transaction or a checkout process. These are a couple of examples. There’s many different angles where um during the the the touch point with the consumer,

Bence Jendruszak: our customer integrates us, and we have a simple API integration. And then we basically ah bill based on the usage of our system. So the more the more checks we do, the more you pay. And you basically pay a couple of, in the ballpark of a couple of cents per check.

Alejandro Cremades: So you guys got started in Europe, and I know that eventually you came here to the US, and then that’s not easy. but what’s that thing What was that journey like of you know figuring out there in Europe?

Alejandro Cremades: Hey, I think that we need to pack the bags and also expand ah over there. you know what How did you come to that realization, and how difficult was that transition?

Bence Jendruszak: Yeah.

Bence Jendruszak: So we originally started building our business in out of Budapest, Hungary, where it was the two of us, my co-founder, and then slowly and steadily we had a team of five then ten and 10 and 30 people. And then all of a sudden we realize we’re serving customers in, uh, in the European region, in, uh, in Asia Pacific and in Latin America.

Bence Jendruszak: And we have a decent revenue share from all these all these areas. and And we knew that stepping into the US was not going to be easy because it’s a very competitive market. Most of ah the competition was based out of there. And at the same time, every time that we had talked to ah a US prospect, their first question was, OK, do you have a US entity?

Bence Jendruszak: Do you have any customers from the US and do you have a u sales account yeah you do have an account executive based out of the US that I can talk to? And the answer was always no to each of these questions. So we we consciously did not step into the US market for the first three approximately three years of our operation, because we felt we could drive enough revenue from all these different markets that I had listed before. And we were we were growing in these different markets. And we knew that we would need more dry powder to to basically tackle the US market. And so I think it was after our Series A funding round, um where which was in like in around 2020, something like that. I mean, the the years are flowing, and like they’re kind of flowing together. But um but after our Series A funding round, we everybody told us, every founder that we talked to,

Bence Jendruszak: who made the leap from Europe to the US, they told us it’s not gonna work out if you just deploy troops over there. like Either a founder has to relocate or you really have to hire some very senior leadership out of the US who who you you know you hold their hand very closely and and you travel a lot and they understand um the product that they have to sell, they understand the market.

Bence Jendruszak: um and deeply and they also live and breathe your culture as a company otherwise they’re just going to be a detached limb and they’re not going to succeed and so we we don’t believe we don’t really believe that as first-time founders and we just hired a couple of account executives and and ah people in charge of cold outreach and we brought them to Hungary for like two months we thought we would train them and then send them back to the US and it’s all going to work out fine And we sent them back and we had tried and tried and tried for a year, about a year, and we realized like this is not going anywhere. Like we’re not we’re not able to gain traction. um And that’s when we we made the conscious decision that somebody’s gonna have to relocate. and um And that’s how I decided in the beginning of last year that I would move to the US. s and And I moved last January to Austin, Texas, where we have our US

Bence Jendruszak: headquarters. And in the meantime, we had also ah hired our chief revenue officer out of the US who transitioned into the company beginning of last year. And he’s been doing an amazing job of up leveling the whole ah revenue organization and transforming the whole revenue organization.

Alejandro Cremades: So talking about the revenue, I mean, you guys were tripling year over year and then that growth also you know came with a with some dangerousness attached to it.

Alejandro Cremades: So so what happened there? you know I mean, when you’re thinking about tripling year over year, you’re like, my God, you know we’re making it happen. But you know theyre that came with some pains so and with a course correction.

Bence Jendruszak: Yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: So talk to us about that.

Bence Jendruszak: Yeah, there was a there was a time when we went from 1 million ARR to 3 million to 10 million ARR. We tripled our revenue of year over year over year for for a couple consecutive years.

Bence Jendruszak: And it was a crazy time of growth. um That that is when I think we We hired, we went from like 30 people to 250 to almost 300 people all of a sudden in a matter of 24 months. um And you know, you start out with, you’re sitting in a room and you can gather everybody and you can interact with everybody on a daily basis ah with around 30 people. And then all of a sudden you’re,

Bence Jendruszak: 250 to 300 people sitting around in different offices or around the world um You’ve got time zone differences that you have to account for um You you’ve just ah yeah, it it was a crazy time of growth and and we made a lot of mistakes we thought that whatever worked at um At the level of at ah At the smaller scale, we can just replicate that at a larger scale. And in reality, that assumption was completely wrong because we had to processize things. We had to implement um systems and tools and processes and actually um find the right leaders ah to scale those given functions. And in a lot of cases, we don’t even take the time to do that.

Bence Jendruszak: Um, you know, just being very, uh, like as I speak about it, I’m being humbled by thinking of that time. There were, there were cases where we, we would scale a team from, I don’t know, five people to 20 people in a matter of a couple of months without hiring, uh, the right leader first, but just, you know, promoting people internally and, and thinking back in hindsight. Yeah. I learned a lot. And so has my co-founder from that time.

Bence Jendruszak: And yeah, it didn’t, I mean, in certain cases, it didn’t end well. We had to realize that we made some mistakes and we had to course correct um those mistakes and make sure that we we we implement the right systems processes and find the right leaders for the teams and also the right people for the teams, because yeah in some cases we we were missing them.

Alejandro Cremades: And in terms of, far I mean, right now, I mean, incredible, you know, the growth, you know, you guys are like at about 40 million ARR, four offices around the world, 270 employees. I mean, obviously, that level of growth to require support and infrastructure from a capital perspective. So how much capital have you guys raised to date? And how has it been also going through the motions of raising money?

Bence Jendruszak: Yeah, um we have raised around $100 million in the ballpark of $100 million dollars thus far. um

Bence Jendruszak: we we close the We closed the Series A funding round around in 2020, and then somewhere in the first quarter of 2022, we closed the Series B. So there wasn’t a long ah time delay between the two, and I might even Like, I mean, uh, like I said, the years are like the exact date. If you ask me right now, I’m not going to recall it. Um, but, uh, but generally speaking, raising capital has not been difficult for us. Um, I think, like I said, fraud is a fraud is a growing economy. Um, and businesses are actually spending more and more on, on fraud tools year on year.

Bence Jendruszak: Um, and so the, the economy’s there, right? Like, like it’s a sticky problem and investors are, are generally from my perspective, they’re, they want to be investing in cybersecurity and fraud prevention. Um, and at the same time, you know, if you see a company that’s growing very healthily, um, then fundraising is is not an issue.

Bence Jendruszak: ah from our perspective and we’ve always closed our rounds pretty swiftly and we’ve chosen chosen the right investors and um and it’s been yeah it’s been pretty good good past couple of years.

Alejandro Cremades: so then So then let’s talk too about the growth because you know with growth, like we said also, you know it could be that it may outpace teams, outpace people. It can also make you reflect on on you know why it makes sense to perhaps let go of egos. Well, what can you tell us about that too?

Bence Jendruszak: Yeah. ah I mean, ri ah coming back to the topic of, of growing and making mistakes, I think another difficult aspect of growing your businesses is understanding that whatever worked from one to 10 million ARR is not going to get you from ah necessarily not going to get you from 10 to 50 million ARR and, and, and 50 to 200 million ARR, let’s say, or, um,

Bence Jendruszak: And, and I think at these different stages of, uh, of the grow fly cycle in a company, you also have to understand what is the skillset that you require from your executive leadership. And, um, and can they actually deliver on that or can they in the, in, as the company grows, can they actually step up, um, their,

Bence Jendruszak: their ownership, their responsibility set, and because the problems change from within these different stages. so So I think in hindsight, I have seen our executive team develop and change in the meantime, right? Like in in some cases, we had to um we had to be very upfront with some of our leaders and and sit down and have a um ah totally transparent conversation about like, hey, we feel like we’ve reached the ceiling and and we’re probably going to have to up level and the way that we’re doing things. And then in certain cases, ah you know the the person decided that they they like working mostly in in the early stages of ah of a startup and a company. In certain cases, the people were motivated to to learn more from their new ah from the new leaders that were coming in and they wanted to stay and we worked it out and we found ah we found the relevant

Bence Jendruszak: um position within the company where they could stay close to the new leader and um and see how we build things from this point onwards. So I think there’s many different cases you really just have to be transparent with one another and set the right goals and objectives and see if we can make the leap and if not then that’s totally fine but then we have to up level the teams and and the skill sets within the teams and at times you just have to hire and a new leader within the team and that’s that.

Alejandro Cremades: And what about, for example, when you’re thinking about building a company, let’s say at a seed stage versus, let’s say, series C you know type of a company, how do you how do you need to be thinking differently?

Bence Jendruszak: Sure. I think in seed stage, um it was really about just getting product market fit and hustling sort of like your way through early revenue growth. And that is what describes my days if I’m a seed stage founder. So I would drive demo calls all day long and in between I would be writing our blog posts for our search engine optimization strategy and hoping to drive some ah more inbound um inbound traffic onto our website that would convert into more demo calls that I could drive the next day.

Bence Jendruszak: um so So then from seed to series A, it was very much about ah about that. And then series A onwards, it was about, okay, let’s like what we’ve done so far seems to be working. We found the relevant verticals that we can address and solve their use cases. So let’s add more heads to into the organization.

Bence Jendruszak: And um that’s exactly what we did. And as we neared Series B, that’s when we should have processized and implemented systems, processes, and upleveled our leadership. And I think we were too late to do that. So that took us a year ah to year and a half to identify. And then that resulted in us having to cut back in certain areas and actually ah tear down certain teams that we had built up And then we had to go from from there onwards. And last year has been about um about operational excellence for us. And our CRO joined beginning of last year. And I think he’s he’s brought great value to our executive team in setting. He’s definitely setting the bar high for a lot of us. And so we doubled down on operational excellence and ensuring that we dedicate enough resources and time on

Bence Jendruszak: on actually making our our ah company scalable from this point onwards and and making our teams investable. um And that’s what we had focused on for the past year. And I’d say we’re in a very good shape now and and we’re in a place where where we’ve been able to gain good US traction. We’ve closed some deals that I’m um’ rather proud of. And I think we, yeah, we’re gonna end this year on on very good terms and I’m happy where we are right now.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. So then let’s talk about vision here. Imagine you were to go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world where the vision you know for the company is fully realized. What does that world look like?

Bence Jendruszak: Yeah, look, I think we’re we’re we’re in an industry which is very impactful. We operate in an industry that is very impactful. we are helping We’re helping stop bad actors from doing what they are. And that has like implications on consumers being being safer.

Bence Jendruszak: uh it has implications on businesses saving uh saving money less less uh less basically less uh cost of fraud uh and you can invest in that that money that you would have lost in other areas um and generally i true i i truly believe that we’re driving towards the the greater good here now unfortunately um it doesn’t mean that we’re gonna be able to stop all the fraudsters everywhere around the world, right? Like this is sort of a cat and mouse game and you decide whether we’re the cat or we’re the mouse um because fraudsters, the the reason why they’re so good at doing what they do is they’re they’re generally very good at identifying loopholes, finding the gaps, and then and then it’s all about like plugging those in and

Bence Jendruszak: and maybe you can stay a step ahead for a certain period of time, but after a while, um these actors are just are just very good at finding loopholes generally. So all in all, I think we’re addressing a very important issue, and I’m like, I’m ready to double down in helping more businesses there than ever before. And I think in the US, I’ve seen I’ve seen some very good signs of of moving towards helping enterprise customers as well in order to solve their fraud issues, which I’m very proud of the the revenue team for actually getting us to a place where we’re enterprise ready. And on the other hand, since this is a growing issue, I don’t see it going anywhere. And like I said earlier, my aspiration is to to definitely go public one day. And I do believe that

Bence Jendruszak: Uh, the company that we’re building, we’re very healthy from a, from a financial perspective. Like I said, you had asked her around their business model. I think this is a business model that is, uh, there’s a very clear cut, it’s plain and simple. Um, the more you use our tool, the the the more you pay basically. Um, and so that’s where we’re at. I’m just excited to be in the space. And I think we, we started with my co-founder at the right time.

Bence Jendruszak: And I’m lucky to have him as a co-founder and we’ll see where this road takes us.

Alejandro Cremades: Well, you guys have been at it now for, you know, it’s it’s on its way to a decade, which is really remarkable. You know, in the world of startups, that’s like a hundred years in corporate, no?

Bence Jendruszak: Yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: So if I was to put you, you know, into a time machine bench and I bring you back in time, let’s say to 2015, where you guys were thinking about a world where you could, you know, take ownership of your own, you know, destiny and let’s say you were able to um Go back and have a chat with your younger self and give that younger bench one piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be and why, given what you know now?

Bence Jendruszak: Ooh, there’s so many things that I had learned and learned year over year. um

Bence Jendruszak: I think definitely I underestimated in the early days the time spent on on stra strategic alignment. you know We had thought that just basic, I think we let a lot of things fall in its place.

Bence Jendruszak: And had we discussed it more, the outcome would have probably been better sooner. And I underestimated the the amount of time that we spent on aligning on on what the strategy should be for the given quarter and then translating that strategy into a roadmap.

Bence Jendruszak: And then actually enforcing accountability from different functions and and leaders of those functions of the the big rocks on the roadmap is very important today. And I’d say we had figured that out. It was always evolving, but we had figured that out now. So I think I underestimated that in the early days. It also took us a couple of times of ah failure or like ah having been faced with with issues and hardships to to learn, to react to having to, you know, when you hit that ceiling that I talked about earlier with your leaders, I think that there was some, sometimes there where we were too late to identify that and we had too much, I think we were emotionally attached to to older ways of of working and we should have acted more quickly. And and I think lastly to sum up like a very,

Bence Jendruszak: To any founder, a very useful piece of advice is if your if your gut tells you that something is wrong um or or you or you feel like you should change something, you probably should.

Bence Jendruszak: so like don’t I think don’t wait to pull the trigger with that given thing. That’s something that I’ve learned over the years is um is act act act quickly because the more you wait, the the bigger the problem goes or the worse the situation becomes and the bigger sort of ripple effects it’s going to have. And that took some time to learn and and master.

Alejandro Cremades: So, Ben, for the people that are listening, I would love to reach out and say hi. What is the best way for them to do so?

Bence Jendruszak: You can always reach me on LinkedIn. You can send me an email on bents at cian.io. um And happy to, you know, happy to to basically interact with anybody. And I talk to a bunch of founders even at earlier stages. ah Sometimes we have dinner. Sometimes we check in on on Zoom calls. And I love, you know, I love ah giving back any of the knowledge that I had acquired over the years. I love giving back to the community. And I know I had conversations, I have conversations with founders that are in later stages as well, where I try to understand how they would think about a certain problem. And it turns out the problems are very much similar in every different case, no matter the company. um So, so yeah, I, I definitely, anybody can reach me if they want to.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Benj, well, thank you so much for being on the Dealmaker show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Bence Jendruszak: Thank you so much Alejandro for having me and and thanks to the listeners for coming.

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