Nuno Sebastião is co-founder, chairman, and chief executive of Feedzai, the company whose machine learning platform fights fraud and money laundering for large banks and payment companies. He founded it in Portugal in 2011 after working as an engineer at the European Space Agency.
From Coimbra to the European Space Agency
Sebastião studied computer science at the University of Coimbra and went on to the European Space Agency, where he worked as an engineer on satellite simulation. He also worked closely with several technology startups, and he has described how an aerospace engineer’s training in complex systems carried into his later work.
Founding Feedzai
In 2011 he founded Feedzai with Paulo Marques and Pedro Bizarro, who is still chief science officer, to fight financial fraud with machine learning. The company grew from Portugal into a global business serving banks, processors, and merchants, and it became a unicorn with close to 800 employees.
Building a RiskOps Platform
Under his leadership Feedzai grew from fraud detection into a RiskOps platform for fraud, scams, and AML, and the European Central Bank chose it to help secure the digital euro. In October 2025 it raised approximately $75 million at a valuation of more than $2 billion. He has won Entrepreneur of the Year honors from London Business School and has shared a stage with Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak. Feedzai competes with Featurespace, NICE Actimize, and SEON.
He has said the company exists because fraud is not just numbers on a balance sheet but families losing their savings. Fifteen years after Coimbra, that is still the line he leads with.
