In a round led by Maverick Ventures, behavioral biometric innovator BioCatch has raised $30 million in new funding. The investment round, which featured participation from American Express Ventures, NexStar Partners, Kreos Capital, CreditEase, OurCrowd, JANVEST Capital and other investors, takes BioCatch’s total funding to more than $41 million.
More importantly, the financing “cements” BioCatch’s “growth plan and vision to redefine digital identity and enable renewed trust in online interactions.
“BioCatch helps answer the question, ‘who are you’ in an online world where fraudsters operate with the legitimate credentials of others, making it very hard to distinguish them from authorized users,” company CEO Howard Edelstein said. Part of an overall “identity strategy” for its clients, Edelstein noted that BioCatch’s technology takes a prevention-oriented approach to cybersecurity that creates as little friction for the customer as possible.
“(Our) strategy cuts across the digital ecosystem,” Edelstein said. “from stopping fraud in real-time to preventing fake accounts from being opened in the first place, all while enabling a seamless user experience.”
Monitoring more than 5 billion transactions a month, BioCatch’s technology develops behavioral biometric profiles of users and models various types of suspicious and malicious behavior. These profiles enable BioCatch to identify malware, robotic activity, phishing and other social engineering-based attacks as well as other threats both before and after login. The technology leverages artificial intelligence, big data, and machine learning and more than 2,000 different parameters to provide real-time alerts when pattern anomalies are spotted.
“Identity is becoming a central component that drives all things digital, which makes the BioCatch story extremely compelling on multiple levels,” Managing Director of Maverick Ventures Matthew Kinsella said.
Last fall, the Tel Aviv, Israel-based company partnered with Samsung SDS America, adding a layer of fraud protection to Samsung SDS’ Nexsign enterprise biometric authentication software. BioCatch partnered with Canadian, boutique-based systems integrator, HoneyTek Systems last September, and teamed up with risk management firm LexisNexis Risk Solutions in August. Edelstein, BioCatch chairman since 2016 who added CEO to his list of duties earlier this year, credited these partnerships for helping “demonstrate how BioCatch is contributing to digital transformation” when it comes to “chang(ing) the way identity is managed online.”
BioCatch demonstrated its Passive Biometrics/Invisible Challenges technology at FinovateFall 2014. The company was founded in 2011.
