Two significant events took place in the Israeli fraud prevention community last week, including an acquisition and a major fundraising round. SecuredTouch, a behavioral biometrics startup that was founded in 2015, was acquired by the Denver-based multi-national Ping Identity. Meanwhile, password-less security company Transmit Security raised $543 million in funding in a Series A round that valued the company at $2.2 billion.
SecuredTouch’s integration with the broader PingOne Cloud Platform is expected to enable customers to access to advanced signals, and intelligence to gain a greater understanding of fraudster behavior, and step up authentication when needed to stop malicious activity and reduce fraud loss. Customers will be able to deploy SecuredTouch as a stand alone solution or as part of the broader Ping One Cloud Platform.
“This is a defining moment for our industry as identity security and fraud come together,” said Alasdair Rambaud, CEO of SecuredTouch.
Interestingly, the buyout took place almost two years after co-founder and CEO Yair Finzi left day-to-day management at the company for a job at Facebook in favor of seasoned executive Alasdair Rambaud. If this move was part of an effort by either the co-founders, the investors or both to ready the company for an exit, it seems to have succeeded. Second co-founder Ran Shulkind will be staying on as Director of Product Management at Ping Identity. The price tag for SecuredTouch was not disclosed.
Entering bubble territory
Meanwhile, Transmit Security’s blockbuster Series A came seven years after the company was founded and after it had already reached $100 million in annual sales. The company provides large enterprises with risk identification and biometric authentication solutions, which make it possible to completely eliminate the use of passwords.
The company exemplifies a trend of cybersecurity and fraud prevention beginning to overlap in the area of identity technology. Transmit’s co-founders Mickey Boodaei and Rakesh Loonkar are serial entrepreneurs having previously established Trusteer a cybersecurity company focused on endpoint protection that was sold to IBM in 2013 for $1 billion. Boodaei also previously co-founded cybersecurity startup Imperva which listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011. Imperva focused on firewall protections for enterprise data and application software.
Whatever Transmit’s privately held numbers disclose, a half-billion Series A sure suggests some frothiness in the local tech scene. Before raising $543 million, Boodaei was quoted in Israeli business paper Calcalist saying, “Money is being pushed in your direction and you require a lot of willpower to reject it. It’s money that fuels itself until things explode. The capital is nearly free for the taking and you can’t fault those who do.”
We seem to be in bubble territory.
