Shape Security has raised a further $51 million in Series F growth funding, valuing the company at $1 billion. The total capital raised to date is now $183 million.
The latest funding was led by C5 Capital and included returning investors Kleiner Perkins, HPE Growth, Norwest Ventures Partners, Focus Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures, Top Tier Capital Partners, and EPIC Ventures.
Shape uses its AI-powered systems for fraud detection to distinguish between human and automated traffic. It already protects some of the world’s largest organizations against cyber fraud, including more than half of all online banking in the U.S. It protects more accounts from fraud than all other providers in the same space combined, detecting and blocking up to two billion fraudulent or unwanted transactions every day.
In May 2019, Shape announced a new product designed to protect small and medium business (SMB) websites from advanced bot-based credential stuffing. The same basic technology that can differentiate between genuine and automated fraud can differentiate between genuine and automated logon attempts.
Derek Smith, co-founder and CEO at Shape, said, “This investment will help us scale our international operations and fuel our AI development.”
C5 Capital, with headquarters in London and offices across Europe is seen as the vehicle to accelerate growth into the UK and Europe. “C5 will bring its network and experience in helping companies develop internationally to support Shape’s growth beyond the North American market and particularly in Europe where cyber fraud awareness remains lower than in the US,” announced C5.
Shape was founded in 2011 by Derek Smith (CEO), Justin Call (VP, R&D), and Sumit Agarwal (COO). It is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It has been recognized as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, as a CB Insights AI 100 company, and — in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 — as the fastest-growing company in Silicon Valley and the third-fastest growing company in the US.
Shape raised $25 million in a Series D funding round led by Baseline Ventures, Northern Light and Epic Ventures in January 2016, and a further $26 million in a Series E funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners in November 2018.
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Related: Credential Stuffing: a Successful and Growing Attack Methodology
Related: Shape Security Emerges From Stealth Mode Swinging at Malware and Bots
Kevin Townsend is a Senior Contributor at SecurityWeek. He has been writing about high tech issues since before the birth of Microsoft. For the last 15 years he has specialized in information security; and has had many thousands of articles published in dozens of different magazines – from The Times and the Financial Times to current and long-gone computer magazines.
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