Nethone
, a Poland-based startup that provides fraud
protection technology for travel suppliers, online retailers and financial
service companies, has raised $6.7 million in Series A funding.
The round is led by Atmos Ventures and ARIA with participation
from Innovation Nest, Plug and Play Ventures, Fiirlej Kastory and several angel
investors.
The company says it will use the funding to accelerate its
go-to-market efforts for its passive behavioral biometrics, which it says
allows online businesses to stop more than 95% of account takeovers.
Nethone says it has seen an escalation in the “professionalization
of fraud” since its founding in 2016, and a spike in particular since the start
of the COVID-19 pandemic as the demand for e-commerce increased.
“Barriers to entry for fraudster-wannabes have been steadily
decreasing. More and more sophisticated SaaS-based tools became available for
anyone with some financial resources at their disposal," says Nethone CEO Hubert Rachwalski von Rejchwald.
"Today, these are
advanced technical solutions built by well-organized, highly experienced groups
of rogue IT experts. Wrapped in a user-friendly interface and excellent
customer support they allow for complex anonymization and automation
functionalities as well spoofing of historically trusted digital identities
that most of the incumbent fraud detection solutions stand no chance of
spotting."
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Nethone’s proprietary “Know Your User” (KYU) technology creates user profiles using machine learning and encompasses more than 5,000
attributes.
“The forward-looking answer to anyone who wishes to
effectively transact online is to deeply understand every single user, as they
browse the website or use a mobile app. Our KYU profiling technology gives
access to first-hand real-time insights about what is really happening with the
device, how this device interacts with the servers of the platform and, last
but not least, what is the raw behavior - keystrokes, mouse movements, gyro or
accelerometer readings,” says Aleksander Kijek, Nethone chief product
officer.
“These are currently over 5,000 attributes that we are
extracting passively in the background about every single user thanks to years
of targeted research and engineering. Importantly our goal is never to affect
the customer journey by staying invisible in the background nor invade end-user
privacy thanks to the low-level nature of the attributes we collect.”
Nethone says it has more than doubled its client base in the
past 12 months. In addition to expanding its go-to-market efforts, the company says it
will accelerate the development of new features.