Andreessen Horowitz Leads $20M Funding Round in Fraud Analytics firm Silver Tail Systems

Silver Tail Systems, Inc., a provider of online fraud and abuse detection and prevention solutions, today announced it has completed a Series B funding round of approximately $20M, led by Silicon Valley Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Back in October 2010, Silver Tail Systems entered into a strategic investment and development agreement with In-Q-Tel (IQT), the not-for-profit, venture capital arm of the CIA.

Silver Tail Systems provides what it calls “third generation fraud prevention” solutions to defend websites against business logic abuse. Business logic abuse is a rising concern and extremely difficult to detect and stop. These hijack threats, velocity attacks and gaming schemes are costing companies billions of dollars per year in online fraud. The company’s Forensics and Mitigation products use behavioral analytics, investigation and real-time disruption to track suspicious behavior and divert the attempted intrusion, leaving legitimate users unaffected.

“The ability to understand and defend web properties is critical for today’s CIOs and the need for our technology has soared as a result,” commented Timothy Eades, CEO of Silver Tail Systems. “Our success reflects this surge in the market, and since our first customer deployment in May 2010, we have grown considerably to support some of the world’s leading websites.” The company says it currently monitors more than 750 million users and more than 1.8 billion web sessions per year through online banks in EMEA and the US, online payment providers, e-commerce sites, and government websites, among others.

“Andreessen Horowitz, one of the industry’s venture capital powerhouses, has invested in Silver Tail Systems as a result of the value they see in our technology and vision,” continued Eades. “We have achieved amazing results to date and because of the growing diversity of online attacks and targets, we are confident that we will continue to accelerate our growth, exceed customer expectations and make groundbreaking progress in the fraud prevention market.”

Scott Weiss, General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz and former co-founder and CEO of IronPort, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007 for $850 Million, has joined Silver Tail System’s Board of Directors. Existing investors Leapfrog Ventures, Seraph Group, and Startup Capital Ventures also participated in the round.