Israeli cyber security company PerimeterX has raised $23 million in a Series B financing round led by Canaan Partners, with participation from previous investors Vertex Ventures and Data Collective (DCVC). Based in Tel Aviv and San Mateo, the company, which raised $12 million last year, was founded in late 2014 by CEO Omri Luz, CTO Ido Safruti and CFO Ophir Ashkenazi, all former executives at mobile app acceleration company Cotendo.
PerimeterX provides behavior-based threat protection technology for cloud, web and mobile. The new funds will be used to accelerate the development of its bot attack prevention technology. With the funding, PerimeterX will expand in the U.S. and internationally, and broaden its platform into new areas. Today, PerimeterX’s web-based Bot Defender product is the market leader, analyzing billions of events daily and blocking hundreds of millions of bot attacks every day.
All companies operating online today face a growing number of increasingly sophisticated attacks by malicious bots. In 2016, bot activity caused $2.6 billion of losses from account takeovers, $7.2 billion in advertising fraud and $950 million in electronic gift card fraud. In her 2017 Internet Trends Report, Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers noted that in 2016 bot-generated traffic surpassed human-generated traffic on the Internet.
Iluz said, “Next-generation automated web attacks today threaten the integrity of the web by impersonating humans and abusing business logic rather than breaching systems, and they even harm the integrity of our political system by spreading fake news. With cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning, the PerimeterX platform technology is purpose-built to address this problem head-on by detecting and blocking the most advanced malicious bots in real-time, at any scale.”
Modern bots attempt to execute a variety of damaging acts such as account takeover, web scraping, carding, checkout abuse and online fraud. The latest generation of bots attempt to impersonate real users and real system behaviors. As a result, they can easily evade detection by legacy tools such as Web Application Firewalls.
“Malicious bot attacks hurt a company’s bottom line and erode consumer trust in a brand. Current strategies are not proving effective,” said Joydeep Bhattacharrya, partner at Canaan Partners, who joined the company’s board as part of the Series B financing. “PerimeterX’s technology not only stops malicious bots in their tracks - it does so at consumer scale.”
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 25, 2017
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