Poland-based Nethone is a company that specialises in cybersecurity with a focus on preventing fraud in remote channels, e.g. payments with credit and debit cards or when it is related to identity or account takeover.
Polish fraud fighter raises Series A round
In a recent development, Nethone announced that it has raised $6.7M (approx €5.67M) in its Series A round of funding. The round was led by Atmos Ventures and ARIA alongside Innovation Nest, Plug and Play Ventures, Firlej Kastory, and several business angel investors.
The investors in this round are known for their investments in transformational high-tech scale-ups focused on research, development and commercialisation of “cutting-edge technologies”.
CEO of ARIA, Dariusz Lewandowski, says, “The accelerated growth of e-commerce in the pandemic era – up 30 per cent 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 $50B. Their technology provides maximum protection without affecting the end-user experience. The company has proven successful in onboarding clients ranging from traditional banks to fast-growing startups across the globe.”
Fighting fraud in the COVID era
According to Nethone, cybersecurity during the pandemic saw an increased growth for direct-to-customer online commerce (both web and mobile) and the associated next-generation financial services.
However, Hubert Rachwalski von Rejchwald, Nethone’s CEO, says, “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-organised, 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.”
In the last 12 months, Nethone was able to provide its solutions to double its client base, increase volumes in onboarding accounts across e-commerce platforms, digital goods & services, and financial services verticals.
Nethone’s solution
The company provides KYU (Know Your User) solutions based on artificial intelligence to help enterprises transform threats and challenges into accurate, profitable business decisions. Its solutions allow companies to simultaneously protect themselves against losses and increase profits.
These solutions include, i.e. security against fraud, real-time tools for adaptive segmentation and customer retention, and behavioural analysis in banking systems to prevent account takeover (ATO) – it stops over 95.3 per cent of ATO. Besides, the Polish fraud fighter also claims to have witnessed an increase in its payment and financial application use cases, systematically proving over ten p.p. higher fraud detection precision.
Aleksander Kijek, Nethone’s CPO, explains, “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, what is the raw behaviour – (keystrokes, mouse movements, gyro or accelerometer readings, touches on mobile).”
Kijek adds, “These are currently over 5000 attributes that we are extracting passively in the background about every single user through 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.”
Capital utilisation
The proceeds from this round will allow the company to accelerate its go-to-market efforts and further strengthen its proprietary ‘Know Your User’ profiling technology to equip companies with the right tools against fraudsters.
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