Nethone’s passive behavioural biometrics enables online businesses to stop over 95.3 percent of account takeovers (ATO), which have been spreading at an alarming rate around the world. Aside from ATO, the Polish fraud fighter has been prospering in its payment and financial application use cases, consistently demonstrating a fraud detection precision of over 10 p.p. greater than traditional methods.
Along with Innovation Nest, Plug and Play Ventures, Firlej Kastory, and numerous business angel investors, Atmos Ventures and ARIA are headlining Nethone’s most recent fundraising round. Nethone will use the Series A funding to accelerate its go-to-market activities and strengthen its exclusive Know Your User (KYUTM) profile technology, giving global leaders the tools, they need to fight fraudsters.
Given the pandemic-induced surge in demand for direct-to-customer online commerce (both web and mobile) and the associated next-generation financial services, COVID-19 elevated the importance of cybersecurity. Nethone has been able to more than double its customer base in the last year, as well as increase the volume of onboarded clients across the eCommerce, digital products and services, and financial services verticals.
Hubert Rachwalski von Rejchwald – Nethone’s CEO said, “The last year has seen an unprecedented spike in fraudsters’ activities. COVID-19 has fueled a ‘professionalization of fraud’ trend that Nethone has been observing systematically escalate since the company’s inception in 2016. “Barriers to entry for fraudster-wannabes have been steadily decreasing. More and more sophisticated SaaS-based tools became available for anyone with some financial resources at their disposal. Today, these are advanced technical solutions built by well-organized, highly experienced groups of rogue IT experts. Wrapped in a user-friendly interface and excellent customer support they allow for complex anonymisation and automation functionalities as well spoofing of historically trusted digital identities that most of the incumbent fraud detection solutions stand no chance of spotting.”
“The forward-looking answer to anyone who wishes to effectively transact online is to deeply understand every single user, as they browse the website or use a mobile app. Our KYU profiling technology gives access to first-hand real-time insights about what is really happening with the device, how this device interacts with the servers of the platform and, last but not least, what is the raw behavior – keystrokes, mouse movements, gyro or accelerometer readings, touches on mobile). These are currently over 5000 attributes that we are extracting passively in the background about every single user thanks to years of targeted research and engineering, Importantly our goal is never to affect the customer journey by staying invisible in the background nor invade end-user privacy thanks to the low-level nature of the attributes we collect” – adds Aleksander Kijek, Nethone’s CPO.
Apart from extending its go-to-market operations, the business intends to use the funds to accelerate roadmap advancement, with a focus on features that will optimise perceived value among the company’s target categories.
“With the post-COVID critical significance of fraud prevention and the fierce competition in creating the frictionless user experience, Nethone has a novel approach to profiling technology fueled by machine learning. And since Atmos is focusing on developing deep technologies in ML-driven commercial solutions, Nethone Profiler combined with the explainability of the machine learning models was an obvious choice for us. We are elated to join the team to arm online merchants with deep tech tools against fraudsters,” said Hadi Solh, Managing Partner at Atmos.
Dariusz Lewandowski, CEO of ARIA said, “The accelerated growth of eCommerce in the pandemic era – up 30% in value by 2020, naturally increases the scale of fraud in the digital space. Nethone solves the problem of online payment and identity fraud, with annual losses worth around $50 billion. Their technology provides maximum protection without affecting the end-user experience. I see huge potential for the application of this technology, including other companies in our portfolio – wherever payments are involved. I am impressed with Nethone’s highly motivated team, as well as the organizational maturity for an early-stage company. Nethone has proven successful in onboarding clients ranging from traditional banks to fast-growing start-ups across the globe.”
