Darwinium – a next-generation digital security and fraud prevention platform – recently announced it had raised $18 million in Series A financing led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), with participation from seed investors Blackbird, Airtree Ventures, and Accomplice. The new funding round brings total investment to $26 million and enables Darwinium to scale its edge-based solution across global geographies, where it is quickly gaining traction across multiple vertical industries, including fintech, eCommerce, financial services, and gaming/gambling.
Online fraud has been becoming harder to detect, facilitated by AI tooling used by adversaries. And businesses have responded with multiple-point solutions deployed across the customer journey, which have created friction for good users, and information siloes that continue to favor the fraudster.
Darwinium addresses these challenges by delivering two key innovations:
1.) It moves fraud detection processes to the customer’s network perimeter (or ‘to the edge’) to provide businesses a holistic view of their customers’ online experience or “journey” across every digital touchpoint, and better separate trusted and risky behavior.
2.) The company pioneered a SaaS-based approach to data protection that weaves strong, strategic data security into its unique, edge-based approach.
Utilizing content delivery networks (CDNs) like Cloudflare and AWS CloudFront to integrate at the network perimeter, Darwinium offers a continuous view of user behavior with flexible journey-time orchestration. And this simpler and smarter deployment model puts full control of fraud and risk mitigation into the hands of businesses, providing the ability to decisions and act on intelligence in real-time, dynamically tailoring customer journeys according to trust and risk.
Darwinium’s platform has out-of-the-box integrations with third-party services that enrich risk decisions with additional intelligence, making it easy for customers to simplify their cyber-fraud strategy by consolidating multiple solutions. And with a SaaS-based approach to managing sensitive customer data identities, Darwinium encrypts and anonymizes data on the edge.
Any of the analyzed customer data is stored within an organization’s own infrastructure, with its own keys. And the platform utilizes a fully anonymized version of this data that could processed and leveraged globally while remaining unexposed/unrecoverable to fraudsters. This streamlines compliance with regulations like the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) while better-preserving user privacy.
KEY QUOTES:
“The Darwinium team has built something truly unique. Darwinium offers a product that is both simple to deploy and effective at reducing fraud losses and reputational damage associated with the ever-more complex web of digital fraud. Darwinium is a game-changer, differentiated in a crowded market, offering the innovation that businesses are asking for to simplify their risk stack.”
— Rick Lewis, General Partner at USVP
“AI capabilities have given fraudsters the upper hand of speed, scale and greater efficiency. This is why we designed Darwinium to deliver the visibility and coverage of a security tool, the context and insight of fraud solutions, with the agility of AI. It’s the platform that will future-proof organizations against the most complex attacks. With this round, we can more effectively execute on our vision to protect every customer from the consequences of fraud, scams and abuse.”
— Alisdair Faulkner, co-founder and CEO of Darwinium and former co-founder and CPO ThreatMetrix (acquired by LexisNexis Risk Solutions in 2018 for $830 million)
