E-commerce security startup Forter lands $3M in funding from Sequoia Capital
Forter, an Israeli security startup that provides online retailers with real-time e-commerce fraud prevention services, secured $3 million in Series A funding from Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
In the wake of catastrophic security breaches at major retailers, including Target and Neiman Marcus among many, many others, retailers online and off are scrambling to find more holistic and comprehensive security applications and processes to safeguard their customers' credit and debit card accounts.
Forter's founders, including CEO Michael Reitblat, first became acquainted with the prowess of behavioral data and cyber intelligence technology as intelligence officers in the Israeli Defense Force, before they went on to start Fraud Sciences, a fraud prevention company that was eventually acquired by PayPal in 2008 for $169 million.
Forter's plug-and-play technology automates the review process by instantly analyzing customers' profile and behavioral data in real time rather than relying on customer-provided data—which is often easy to falsify—to approve transactions.
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"Forter’s technology, in Target’s instance, would have made it extremely hard for fraudsters to monetize this data in the online space," Reitblat said in a statement.
Forter also provides its clients with a 100-percent chargeback guarantee.
"We believe Forter has great potential to become a big company," Shmil Levy, a partner at Sequoia Capitol, said in a statement. "The company's technology is innovative and the team is exceptional. There is no other technology in the e-commerce space that provides merchants with a solution that prevents their businesses from being hurt by fraud."