Sift Science, a leader in the fraud prevention software space, announced the close of a $53 million Series D funding round led by Stripes Group, a New York-based growth equity firm with investments in companies such as Udemy, Grubhub and Flatiron Health. Other investors participated in the round, including existing investors Insight Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital.
The latest round bring the Silicon Valley-based company’s total raised to $107 million. Previous backers include PayPal Holdings co-founder and angel investor Max Levchin, Andreessen Horowitz’s general partner Chris Dixon, Salesforce.com Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff and Reddit’s co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
The company says it plans to use the financing to broaden its global footprint in the high growth fraud detection and prevention market, estimated to reach almost $42 billion by 2020, according to MarketsandMarkets.
Acting as a “safety layer for the digital economy,” the SaaS company uses real-time machine learning to “reshape the way business and consumers interact online,” seeking to offer more confidence, transparency and security. The company’s Digital Trust Platform hosts a full suite of fraud prevention products, protecting businesses from a wide range of fraud and abuse cases such as account takeovers, payment fraud, and abusive user-generated content. The platform uses live machine learning to learn user behavior across the Sift global digital trust network, comprised of over 6,000 online properties, in order to score users’ trustworthiness in real-time.
“Our Digital Trust Platform already protects world-leading digital brands from fraud. This investment will help us strengthen our global alliances and introduce our award-winning platform to enterprise organizations that rely on ineffective legacy fraud solutions,” said Sift Science’s CEO and co-founder Jason Tan.
The startup, which launched in 2001, lists industry leaders such as Twitter, Airbnb, Yelp!, Shutterstock, Jet, Indeed and Wayfair as clients. It works in a number of vertical markets including physical and digital e-commerce, travel and hospitality, communities and marketplaces, financial institutions and payments processors, and SaaS companies.
