E-commerce, anti-fraud platform Signifyd has raised $7 million in Series A financing from a squad of all-star investors including Allegis Capital, IA Ventures, Lucas Venture Group, QED Investors, and Tekton Venture, Finovate confirmed today.
The investment takes Signifyd’s total capital to more than $11 million.
Signifyd’s technology—referred to as “fraudsurance” by company CEO and co-founder Rajesh Ramanand—automates the process of verifying identity, leveraging the social graph to see if people making online transactions are who they say they are. In the past, this process has involved sending customer agents to as many as a dozen different locations, from Google and LinkedIn to IP lookup websites and open-source services like White Pages. Courtesy of Signifyd and its Social Graph, a process that could take an individual as much as a half hour or more now takes “milliseconds.”
“We pull together all the data needed to screen a transaction and look at the identities involved holistically,” said Ramanand in the wake of his company’s previous funding round. “With Signifyd, you get a one-stop solution, from automated scoring to manual review, even if you do not have any prior internal history on the customer.”
Signifyd CEO and co-founder Rajesh Ramanand demonstrated Guaranteed Payments at FinovateSpring 2013 in San Francisco.
Signifyd estimates that the average e-commerce retailer loses more than 3% a year to fraud, when chargebacks, incorrectly declined orders, and security costs are taken into account. The fact that retailers have to be aware of an ever-widenening array of potential threats and to make sure that any safeguards against them are well integrated (i.e., work with each other and the merchant’s payment processes), spells huge opportunity for anti-fraud specialists like Signifyd.
The company said that it has reduced the amount of time spent manually reviewing transactions by as much as 60%, while simultaneously increasing catch rates. The result has been not only improvements in chargeback detection, but also fewer overall declines because of the company’s ability to leverage and use social profile data. Signify believes this is unique among anti-fraud solutions.
Founded in 2011 in Palo Alto, California, Signifyd made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2013 in San Francisco. CEO and co-founder Ramanand demonstrated the company’s Guaranteed Payments solution. That same year, Signifyd won the Merchant Risk Council award for Most Innovative Startup.
