Darwinium raises $10 million to deliver a new approach to customer protection
Darwinium has revealed a seed funding round of $10 million USD led by Blackbird alongside Airtree, both Australian headquartered Venture Capitalist firms. The initial funding round, raised to elevate the global launch of the company into the security and fraud sector, will be targeted towards both product and customer expansion.
Additional funding was supported by several prominent angel investors including Naval Ravikant and Jeff Fagnan.
The company was founded by Alisdair Faulkner, CEO of Darwinium and former Chief Product Officer of ThreatMetrix, which was acquired for $817 million in 2018. Darwinium is also supported by Reed Taussig as board Chairman who was previously the Chairman and CEO of ThreatMetrix.
Darwinium is delivering an entirely new approach to holistic customer protection by combining the tools used internally for cybersecurity with the tools used to fight fraud, providing a single window into a user’s entire digital journey.
Account compromise and online fraud continue unabated, facilitated by swathes of breached credentials, despite large investments in solutions meant to separate good and bad behavior. Faulkner has built Darwinium to redress this inequality, and to unify a widely disjointed approach to security controls which he has seen is hugely impacting businesses’ ability to protect their organizations.
He commented: “The industry is seeing a surge in fraudsters capitalizing on new technology and techniques to adapt attacks targeting online businesses and currently many are operating with ‘point-in-time’ solutions that are not fit for purpose. Alongside this, the security and fraud divisions of these businesses are operating in siloes which leaves them wide open to attacks. Fraud Farms walk right past bot defenses, and social engineering and malware render fraud solutions useless. Protecting your customers must be about continuously scrutinising their digital journey and behavior, rather than a point-in-time evaluation. It requires a joined-up system that allows proper collaboration between digital security and fraud via one singular view.”
Faulkner continued: “These siloed and limited approaches are consistently causing unnecessary friction for those customers that businesses want to protect their sales process and cart abandonment. They are often deterring good customers and losing businesses billions in both revenue, fraud losses and unnecessary operational costs. Darwinium’s platform addresses these challenges and allows online businesses to capture valuable intelligence across their sales journey. Risk decisions can then favor the customer and not the fraudster.”
The Darwinium difference – a technical outline
Darwinium is the Customer Protection Platform that operates across a company’s entire digital presence: Web, Apps and APIs. Its risk-based orchestration operates at the perimeter edge, assessing every digital interaction to identify bad behaviour and automate remediation, in real time.
Darwinium is unique in its ability to build complete “signatures” for both every digital interaction, and across digital journeys. These are comprised of rich intelligence related to human versus automated markers, devices, locations, behaviors, behavioral biometrics data, digital content and user profiles.
Unlike first generation behaviorial biometric solutions which provide anomaly scores, Darwinium is the solution that turns behavior into identity allowing ability to find related entities and activities.
Using this intelligence, businesses can better orchestrate risk-appropriate customer journeys, integrating native Darwinium capabilities and third-party services, and ultimately make risk decisions that enable good customers, and block adversaries, all in real time.