The second half of March was an eventful month for startup funding in the fraud prevention space. Sift Science raised $53 million in a Series D round in the biggest investment announcement of the month.
The San Francisco-based company offers a machine learning based fraud prevention solution to e-commerce merchants is building out its Digital Trust Platform. Sift Science platform offering is supposed to protect clients from all major fraud vectors, including card-not-preset fraud, account takeover (ATO), fake accounts and abusive user-generated content. The startup leverage is growing network of over 6,000 online properties to score users’ trustworthiness in real time and track their activity across different sites.
“We are very excited to be partnering with the Sift team to work towards their ambitious goal of building the first highly scalable trust and safety layer for the digital economy,” said Stripes Group Partner Ron Shah in a press release announcing the investment.
The investment round was led by Stripes Group and included existing investors Union Square Ventures, Insight Venture Partners and Spark Capital. Sift Sciences’ total investment stands at $107 million.
Midigator raises $30M investment
Chargeback management solution provider Midigator closed a 30$ million round in growth funding. Midigator provides a fully-automated solution to prevent, manage and analyze card chargebacks for merchants.
“Merchants, small and large, are struggling to keep pace with the rapid growth of fraud and payment card chargebacks,” said Midigator founder and CEO Corey Baggett. “Midigator’s fully-automated software platform is uniquely positioned to help processors, acquiring banks, ISOs and merchants prevent and manage chargebacks.”
The $30 million investment came entirely from LLR Partners, a private equity firm focused on creating long-term value in targeted industries.
New KYC blockchain raises $15M
Meanwhile, some blockchain startups are utilizing the technology to create know-your-customer (KYC) solutions. The latest to hit the news was Spring Labs a U.S.-based startup that successfully raise $14.8 million in early stage funding at the end of March. The company is looking to revolutionize the credit and identity sharing process through a decentralized network that enables a more transparent, efficient and secure model for sharing information related to identity and credit.
Spring Labs press release was a bit hazy on the details of its solution, but the company noted that it already had an agreement to launch a data partnership with Avant a fintech lending platform, where Spring Labs founders previously worked. Avant has originated loans worth $5 billion to over 600,000 customers.
“Leveraging blockchain technology and our deep knowledge of financial services, we are engineering a fundamentally new way to approach the industry that benefits both consumers and financial institutions with greater data transparency, efficiency and security,” said Spring Labs CEO Adam Jiwan.
August Capital led the early stage funding round, which also included Pritzker Group Ventures, GreatPoint Ventures, Jump Capital and Victory Park Capital among others.
