Tag: threatmetrix

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Anglo-Hungarian anti-fraud platform SEON pulls in a $94M Series B led by IVP

Last year, SEON, which has an anti-fraud platform designed to fight accounts raised a $12 million Series A. It does this by looking at a customer’s ‘digital footprint’ – especially their social media – in order to weed out false accounts and thus prevent fraudulent transactions. Clients included Patreon, AirFrance, Rivalry and Ladbrokes.

The London-based Anglo-Hungarian startup has now raised a $94 million Series B funding round led by Silicon Valley-based IVP. Also participating were existing investors Creandum and PortfoLion.

The funding will be used to expand SEON’s presence in North America, LATAM, and APAC. Its customers now include Revolut, NuBank, Afterpay, Patreon, Sorare, and mollie.

Seon’s fortunes have been uplifted by the acceleration of consumer activity and transactions online due to the pandemic, which also saw the fast growth of identity fraud.

In a statement Tamas Kadar, CEO and Co-founder at SEON said: “SEON is bringing something different to the fraud prevention market by offering an accessible and flexible solution, which delivers instant results. Once discovered, our solution can be trialed by potential customers in less than 30 seconds and up and running in less than a day.”

SEON will appoint Michael Miao, Partner at IVP to its board. 
 
“Identity is one of the most important and biggest problems on the Internet. This product-led team is making a remarkable dent in fraud prevention by making it easy for every business to adopt its data-driven solution,” added Miao.
 
SEON is seen as competing with Emailage, Iovation, Threatmetrix. However, SEON’s thesis is that social media is a great proxy of a legitimate user vs bot/fake fraudster, so it looks heavily at social accounts to weed out fraudsters.

Angel investors also participating in the round included founders and senior executives from Aiven, Coinbase, Datadog, Doordash, Figma, G2 Crowd, GitHub, Public, Slack, Supercell, UiPath, Veriff, and Wise.

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RSA spins off fraud and risk intelligence unit as Outseer

RSA Security has spun out its fraud and risk intelligence business into a standalone company called Outseer that will double down on payment security tools amid an “unprecedented” rise in fraudulent transactions.

Led by CEO Reed Taussig, who was appointed head of RSA’s Anti-Fraud Business Unit last year after previously serving as CEO of ThreatMetrix, the new company will focus solely on fraud detection and management and payments authentication services.

Outseer will continue to operate under the RSA umbrella and will inherit three core services, which are already used by more than 6,000 financial institutions, from the company: Outseer Fraud Manager (formerly RSA Adaptive Authentication), a risk-based account monitoring service; 3-D Secure (formerly Adaptive Authentication for eCommerce), a card-not-present and digital payment authentication mapping service; and FraudAction, which detects and takes down phishing sites, dodgy apps and fraudulent social media pages.

Outseer says its product portfolio is supported by deep investments in data and science, including a global network of verified fraud and transaction data, and a risk engine that the company claims delivers 95% fraud detection rates.

Commenting on the spinout, Taussig said: “Outseer is the culmination of decades of science-driven innovation in anti-fraud and payments authentication solutions. As the digital economy continues to deepen, the Outseer mission to liberate the world from transactional fraud is essential. Our role as a revenue enabler for the global economy will only strengthen as every digital business continues to scale.”

RSA, meanwhile, will continue to focus on integrated risk management and security products, including Archer for risk management, NetWitness for threat detection and response, and SecureID for identity and access management (IAM) capabilities.

The spinout comes less than a year after private equity firm Symphony Technology Group (STG), which recently bought FireEye’s product business for $1.2 billion, acquired RSA Security from Dell Technologies for more than $2 billion. Dell had previously acquired RSA as part of its purchase of EMC in 2016.

It also comes amid a huge rise in online fraud fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Federal Trade Commission said in March that more than 217,000 Americans had filed a coronavirus-related fraud report since January 2020, with losses to COVID-linked fraud totaling $382 million. Similarly, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fielded 542,300 fraud complaints in 2020, a 54% increase over 2019.

RSA said that with the COVID-19 pandemic having fueled “unprecedented” growth in fraudulent transactions, Outseer will focus its innovation on payments authentication, mapping to the EMV 3-D Secure 2.x payment standard, and incorporating new technology integrations across the payments and commerce ecosystem. 

“Outseer’s reason for being isn’t just focused on eliminating payments and account fraud,” Taussig added. “These fraudulent transactions are often the pretext for more sinister drug and human trafficking, terrorism, and other nefarious behavior. Outseer has the ability to help make the world a safer place.”

Valuation information for Outseer was not disclosed, nor were headcount figures mentioned in the spinout announcement. Outseer didn’t immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for more information. 

Dell sells RSA to consortium led by Symphony Technology Group for over $2B

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SpecTrust raises millions to fight cybercrime with its no-code platform

Risk defense startup SpecTrust is emerging from stealth today with a $4.3 million seed raise and a public launch.

Cyber Mentor Fund led the round, which also included participation from Rally Ventures, SignalFire, Dreamit Ventures and Legion Capital.

SpecTrust aims to “fix the economics of fighting fraud” with a no-code platform that it says cuts 90% of a business’ risk infrastructure spend that responds to threats in “minutes instead of months.” 

“In January of 2020, I got a bug in my ear to, instead of an API, build a cloud-based service that handles all this complex orchestration and unifies all this data,” said CEO Nate Kharrl, who co-founded the company with Bryce Verdier and Patrick Chen. “And, it worked. And it worked fast enough that you can’t even tell it’s there doing its work.”

For example, he says, SpecTrust even in its early days was able to pull identity behavior information in seconds.

“Today, it’s more like five and seven milliseconds,” he said. “And, engineers don’t have to lift anything or adjust data models.”

Since the San Jose, California-based startup’s offering is deployed on the internet, between a website or app and its users, an organization gets fraud protection without draining the resources of its engineers, the company says. Founded by a team that ran risk management divisions at eBay and ThreatMetrix, SpecTrust is banking on the fact that companies — especially financial institutions — will be drawn to the flexibility afforded by a no-code offering.

Don’t hate on low-code and no-code

Much of the industry is split up between compliance and onboarding, authenticating risk and payments, and user trust and safety, Kharrl said.

“We put all the tools together to address all things combined, to make sure the person an institution is talking to is who they say they are, and not acting with malicious intent,” he told TechCrunch. “We sit in between them and their traffic to make sure the risk and fraud teams have what they need to spot bad guys.”

Image Credit: SpecTrust

Online businesses spend billions on risk defense yet still lose a lot of money to fraudsters, scammers and identity thieves, Kharrl said. And, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global shift in the digital economy as more people came to rely on the internet to meet day-to-day needs. 

“With these new trends in commerce and banking came more opportunities for fraudsters, scammers and identity thieves to target people and businesses,” he added. For example, an alarming number of cybercriminals employed no-code attack tools and click-to-deploy infrastructure to launch sophisticated attacks.

Fintech and crypto companies are feeling the biggest impacts, as legacy software designed for big banks, for example, can be slow and expensive, said Kharrl. 

“We built SpecTrust to instantly put complete assessment, automation and enforcement capabilities in the hands of teams charged with fighting modern cybercrime threats,” he said.

Using its platform, the company says an organization’s risk team can review and investigate everything a customer does “from its first page view to its last click with unified behavior, identity, history and risk data.” 

Even non-technical staffers can do things like identify attack behavior, verify customer identity information, validate payment details and work to mitigate threats before they become losses, according to Kharrl.

Fraud prevention platform Sift raises $50M at over $1B valuation, eyes acquisitions

Jon Lim of SignalFire says that SpecTrust has built an end-to-end risk protection platform that enables customers of all sizes and risk profiles “to access the latest innovative risk protection solutions, quickly respond to the evolving threat landscape and share the best practices and learnings across the entire customer base.”

And of course, it was drawn to the startup’s no-code platform and ability to provide visibility over every user interaction versus treating each interaction as an independent event.

“This not only delivers stronger protection to customers but also a smoother experience to the end user,” Lim said.

The fraud prevention space is hot these days. Sift, which also aims to predict and prevent fraud, in April raised $50 million in a funding round that valued the company at over $1 billion.

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Fraud prevention platform Seon raises a $12M Series A round led by Creandum

Seon, which lets online businesses fight online fraud like fake accounts has raised a $12 million Series A round led by Creandum, with participation from PortfoLion, part of OTP Bank. The funding appears to be one of Hungary’s larger series A rounds to date.
 
Seon is a fraud-detection startup that establishes a customers’ ‘digital footprint’ in order to weed out false accounts and thus prevent fraudulent transactions. Clients include Patreon, AirFrance, Rivalry and Ladbrokes Launched in 2017, the company claims to bave been profitable since the end of 2019, after experiencing growth through working with neobanks, esports, gaming, Forex, and crypto trading throughout the rapid digitization brought on by the pandemic.

SEON’s CEO and Founder, Tamas Kadar, said in a statement: “We’re extremely pleased to have completed our latest funding round, led by Creandum, joining its exciting tech portfolio. We feel we have found a like-minded investor to work closely with to pursue the significant global opportunity for our business as we continue to democratize fraud fighting.”
 
Simon Schmincke, general partner at Creandum, said: “At Creandum, we believe cybercrime will be one of the most serious threats of the 21st century. With SEON, we’ve found an anti-fraud solution that’s effective, affordable, flexible, intuitive, and clearly proves its ROI.”
 
Gábor Pozsonyi, partner at PortfoLion Capital Partners, added: “Seon is a fundamentally useful brand: it offers a solution to one of the greatest challenges of digitalization, not only saving hundreds of millions of euros for its partners but making the internet a safer place.”

SEON are seen as competing with Emailage, Iovation, Threatmetrix. However, SEON’s thesis is that social media is a great proxy of a legitimate user vs bot/fake fraudster, so it looks heavily at social accounts to weed out fraudsters.

As part of the funding round, Seon has brought on board the following investors as shareholders: N26 founders, Maximilian Tayenthal and Valentin Stalf; SumUp founders Stefan Jeschonnek and Jan Deepen; Tide CEO Laurence Krieger; Revolut ex-CFO Peter O’Higgins; iZettle ex-chief Product Officer Leo Nilsson; Onfido cofounder Eamon Jubawy, and ComplyAdvantage founder Charlie Delingpole.