The Internet has enabled the seamless flow of commerce in an unprecedented fashion. But where transactions go, so do bad actors. We currently estimate online fraud to be a $40B problem, and it’s just getting worse. The few rarified Internet giants like Google & Amazon have built large dedicated teams and sophisticated technology solutions to combat fraud. But what about everyone else? Even our largest commerce and marketplace investments at Spark suffer from fraud and have turned to third parties for help.
I am thrilled today to announce that Spark Capital is leading a $18MM Series B financing of Sift Science, the world’s most advanced fraud prevention platform. Sift Science empowers online merchants with real-time, large-scale machine learning via an easy to integrate API that unlocks deep customer insight and helps businesses large and small prevent fraud on their sites.
Sift launched it’s first machine learning as a service product just over a year ago, and today analyzes more than $1.5 billion of transactions and 600 million events each month. They have grown their customer base over 50x in the past year and today power fraud prevention across the globe for high-growth businesses like Airbnb, Uber, JackThreads, Kickstarter and HotelTonight. With an API that can be integrated in a day, a real-time fraud console, and plugins for Shopify and Magento, Sift is simply the easiest and best fraud prevention service on the planet.
One of the most exciting things about Sift’s machine learning platform is that it continues to get smarter and better as more customers join the Sift network. Each customer brings unique data to the platform that Sift utilizes to identify and weed out bad actors wherever they may appear. In true Internet form, everyone on Sift’s network benefits from everyone else’s collective data and intelligence.
Sift Science is a new style of SAAS business, utilizing easy to integrate APIs for distribution, leveraging a freemium business model and benefitting from terrific network effects at scale. We’ve made a number of investments in this area at Spark and will continue to look for more.
I’m thrilled to join , and the rest of the excellent Sift Science team to help them realize their vision of making the Internet a safer, better and more profitable place.