clean.io, a Baltimore, Maryland-based leader in the prevention of cross-platform malvertising, announced it has raised $2.5 million in a seed round of funding led by Real Ventures. Over the last 18 months, the company has been operating under the brand Clean Creative and it is now rebranded to clean.io.
clean.io essentially protects the digital media ecosystem — which is a market valued at more than $100 billion. And clean.io’s solution behavioral analysis to prevent undesired JavaScript execution on websites and in apps so that consumers, publishers, advertisers, and the platforms that serve them are no longer vulnerable to these types of attacks. Typically, bad actors are leveraging the openness of the programmatic advertising ecosystem to buy media campaigns to launch unwanted attacks often fraudulently masquerading as legitimate brand advertisers.
“Programmatic advertising is the perfect breeding ground for bad actors to launch attacks since it is open, with the ability to reach billions of connected devices anytime, globally,” said clean.io CEO Matt Gillis. “The clean.io solution not only protects the ecosystem by preventing unwanted malicious attacks – but it also makes these attacks unprofitable for the bad actors, in turn deterring them from attacking partners protected by clean.io. We’re excited to have more fuel in the rocketship to build on the amazing traction we’ve had thus far.”
With this round of funding, the company is going to continue scaling the business by adding more engineering and security talent to provide effective and robust solutions that protect publishers, advertisers, and consumers from threats against the free and open Internet. There are thousands of websites and apps that have already trusted clean.io to protect their monetization and ensure a flawless user experience.
“We are extremely excited to back the incredible team assembled at clean.io. Their rapid, early customer adoption attests to the acute challenge the digital media ecosystem is facing as well as the effectiveness of the solution the team has built. The talent and technology make an impeccable pairing to attack this massive problem that is causing disruption to the industry and its end users,” added Real Ventures partner Alan MacIntosh.
