The 100-Patent Milestone: Why R&D and Innovation are Feedzai’s Secret Weapon

Feedzai recently secured its 100th patent, a milestone that represents far more than just legal intellectual property. For Feedzai Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer, Pedro Bizarro, this moment highlights the importance of building a “culture of excellence.” In this interview, Pedro pulls back the curtain into the patent inventor perspective and explains how a “startup within a startup” mentality allows Feedzai to anticipate fraud trends years before they become widespread. 

Read the conversation and explore the deep connection between scientific discovery and the human drive to solve the industry’s most complex financial crimes.

Key Takeaways

• When investing in innovation, it’s critical to build a culture of excellence that attracts, builds, and retains talent while bringing out the best in team members.
• Feedzai collaborates regularly with universities. Feedzai researchers are focused on “applied research” to solve concrete pains for our products and our clients. 
• For banks, choosing a fraud engine is a long-term, high-stakes decision. That’s why customers see Feedzai’s investment in research as a sign that we are investing both in our future and investing in theirs at the same time. 

What does the 100-patent milestone mean to you and Feedzai?

If you get one patent, it’s a sign you’ve got a good idea. If you get 10 patents, it’s a sign that you have a good team. But if you get 100 patents, it’s a sign that you have an amazing culture.

It means that for many generations of people, as team members come and go, the culture of excellence and scientific quality remains. To have really good people year after year, you need a culture that attracts, trains, and retains talent while promoting the best in them. For me, these 100 patents are proof that we have maintained a high-quality scientific culture for a very long period of time.

How do you see the connection between patents and the people who create them?

I truly believe there is a direct connection between people and patents. I remember when I was a grad student, a professor told me that the best outcome of a PhD is not the research. It’s the student. You are transformed as you become a better researcher.

At Feedzai, we are doing the same: we are transforming people into becoming better scientists. We encourage them to think from first principles, solve problems the right way, and collaborate. The growth of the individual and the growth of our intellectual property are one and the same.

What does it actually mean to be a ‘patent inventor’ in the world of science?

In this day and age, scientists have many ways to produce content from papers and blog posts to open-source software. But a patent has one of the highest degrees of difficulty. The requirements for a granted patent mean the idea must be original, difficult, and useful.

Being an inventor means belonging to a narrow niche of people who can find those rare ideas and bring them to life with high quality and impact. It is a long road. You have to fight for your ideas, improve them, and respond to challenges from patent offices. There is an amazing feeling in working from a whiteboard idea to something tangible and receiving a notice that your idea was the first time in history someone had that thought.

How does Feedzai balance academic research with practical business needs?

We collaborate extensively with universities, but when researchers are at Feedzai, they are focused on “applied research”. We are trying to solve concrete pains for our products and our clients. We ask: How can we make this more efficient, faster, or less expensive? These questions are all specific to Feedzai.

The work is exploratory by design, which means we must push the envelope. Some of what we do in research does not lead to a patent or a product. But the portion that does succeed becomes mission-critical. For example, our Railgun engine, which powers our clients and processes trillions of dollars, was a patented innovation that came directly out of research.

How does your team stay ahead to find unique ideas?

Everyone in research is attuned to the state-of-the-art. In addition to our day-to-day work, we are frequently reading papers, attending conferences, and holding internal “show-and-tell” presentations. Continuous learning and teaching are responsibilities for everyone on the team.

Because we are so aware of what exists, we can look at a new scientific idea and realize why it might not work for Feedzai. Perhaps it doesn’t scale or it’s too expensive. We then look for the “hurdle” (perhaps latency, complexity, or a CPU problem?) and try to solve it. By understanding both the customer’s pain and the state-of-the-art, we find those niches where a new solution has immense value.

Can you describe the personal feeling of securing that very first patent?

It was a special moment because it made me feel like an inventor. By that point, I had already been a professor and co-founded Feedzai, but having a patent granted made my accomplishments feel even more concrete, more special. It felt like finishing a marathon.

That feeling was the spark for me to create a “creativity engine” that would be bigger than any one person. Once you discover the process for that first patent, you can iterate and make it faster. We went from taking several years to get our first patent approval to now submitting about 10 patent applications every year.

Why did Feedzai decide to invest in a research department early on?

When there were only about 25 people at the company, Nuno Sebastião and us, the other two co-founders, decided that to remain competitive, we must have a research department. That is very rare for a small startup; usually, you only see research departments at massive institutions such as Google, Microsoft, or IBM.

What we felt was that the pressure of sales and product development is so high that if we didn’t have someone looking two or three years ahead, we would be disrupted by someone else doing better, more novel research. We realized that we had toanticipate trends. We started working on cloud and Python before they were common for our customers. 

Effectively, we built Feedzai Research as a “startup within the startup”. Nuno’s mandate to me was: “Invent the stuff that another company would have to invent to put us out of business”.

How has this focus on research changed the way clients and the industry view Feedzai?

Initially, I didn’t realize how much clients would value research. I thought they only cared about product features. But for a bank, choosing a fraud engine is a long-term, high-stakes decision. They are helping them authorize or block transactions. It is understandably incredibly sensitive.

Clients see our investment in research as a sign that we are a “safe bet”. If we are investing in our future, we are investing in theirs as well. It gives them peace of mind. I’ve even seen our published papers on clients’ desks, and they often follow our work on LinkedIn. It’s a clear signal to the market that Feedzai is at the forefront of research in financial crime fighting.

What drives you personally to continue building this culture for the talent of the future?

I feel deeply that education is the best “social elevator”. It is the tool that more easily allows people to have better lives. I believe everyone should have access to quality education regardless of their background.

I have benefited from incredible institutions from the University of Coimbra to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to Carnegie Mellon as a professor. Later on I went to Técnico in Lisbon as a professor and I had summer internships at Microsoft Research and also at CERN. I’ve seen people from all nationalities improve their lives by studying hard and building careers related to science and engineering. Those careers allow them to give back, start companies, and create jobs. 

Education is the driving force that helps people, companies, and society. That is what drives me.

Additional Resources

• Blog: The Future of AI and Trust
• Product Blog: RiskFM: From Custom Models to Foundation Intelligence
• Whitepaper: Network Intelligence at Scale: Mastering Real-Time A2A
• Solution: AI that Goes Beyond the Ordinary