BENGALURU: PayPal Holdings has said it will buy Palo Alto and Hyderabad based Simility, a fraud prevention and risk management platform, for $120 million in cash. The acquisition of Simility will enhance PayPal’s ability to deliver fraud prevention and risk management solutions to merchants globally.PayPal had participated in Simility's last funding round, led by Accel, as a strategic investor. The company had raised around $25 million in funding. Simility, which was founded in 2014, provides cloud-based and on-premise fraud detection software solutions.“Digital commerce has exploded, and fraudsters have taken note, adapting and developing new methods to carry out their crimes. Together with Simility, we will be able to put more control in the hands of our merchants to fight fraud while helping make commerce experiences faster and more secure,” said Bill Ready, chief operating officer, PayPal.Following the close of the transaction, merchants on the PayPal platform will gain access fraud prevention tools that can be customised to reflect the needs of their businesses through their existing account management dashboard.Simility’s fraud detection software solution combines machine learning and human analysis. The company’s platform protects enterprise clients and SMBs from the most types of fraud, and helps fraud analysts to adapt to fraudsters’ evolving tactics—without having to write code.The company had seen global adoption among enterprise customers in financial services, retail and payments, from the largest e-commerce platform in Africa to global Fortune 500 financial services organisations, including top 50 banks in the United States.“Our vision for Simility was to create an adaptive risk management platform that empowers organisations operating in a digital world to manage an evolving fraud and risk landscape,” said Rahul Pangam, CEO, Simility. The company was founded by Rahul Pangam, Kedar Samant and Uttam Phalnikar..Subject to customary closing conditions, this transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018.The deal comes after there have been several other enterprise deals in the recent past including American Express’ acquisition of Mezi, Nutanix pocketing Minjar and ESW Capital buying Kayako.“There is no doubt that acquisitions like this are good for the ecosystem. Around $100 million is what the sweet spot is. This reiterates what we have been talking about in terms of our ability to build products and get validation in India and in the global scale. The pace of these acquisitions has gone up, but we certainly need more of these. This will give the visibility that companies can come and buy in India. (The ecosystem) is going in the right direction,” said Naganand Doraswamy, managing director, Ideaspring Capital.