Bot protection platform InfiSecure, a YourStory Tech 30 startup, raises $600K

There are estimated to be about 3.5 billion internet users worldwide, but bots currently constitute about 50-60 percent of online traffic. The growing bot traffic on the internet has been a serious concern to online businesses and has resulted in significant losses in the last few years. Malicious bots not only scrape information from websites, but also add to overall website traffic and overburden servers.

InfiSecure, a real-time bot detection and protection platform, on Wednesday announced that it had closed $600,000 in seed funding from IDG Ventures and Axilor Ventures. Infisecure was also one of YourStory’s Tech 30 2016 companies that pitched at TechSparks 2016.

Story so far

Launched in March 2016 by the duo of Abhilash Pandey and Sandeep Singh, InfiSecure is a robust bot protection platform that sanitises a website’s traffic and improves business metrics. Abhilash is an engineer-MBA with partner management experience in companies such as Microsoft, Facebook and TCS, while Sandeep is an inbound marketing expert who had previously worked with TCS, Microsoft and NASSCOM.

InfiSecure blocks bad bot traffic, while ensuring that legitimate users are able to access the website. Working as a 24/7 SaaS solution, InfiSecure also gives businesses insights into their bot traffic and eliminates bad, unwanted or suspicious behaviour in real-time.

Infisecure currently consists of a team of 10 people, and Abhilash noted that they aim to keep their organisation structure lean and hire talent who could bring a significant difference to their technology and business. Talking about the market pain-point, Abhilash noted,

There cannot be a more relevant time for bot protection than now, when bots constitute more than half of the global internet traffic.With evolving technologies, bot frauds have reached new heights, negatively impacting every online business in more ways than ever before. With InfiSecure, we help businesses keep their website secured so that they can focus on their core business.

The founders noted that Infisecure is already protecting several global online businesses from scraping, bot abuse, fake traffic fraud, content theft, form spam and other online frauds that are caused by bots.InfiSecure’s technology generates revenue through a licensing model with monthly and annual plans, with the pricing directly proportionate to its customer's business.

In a previous interview with YourStory, Abhilash had noted that InfiSecure was seeing the most traction for e-commerce and had around 17 customers. Content platforms came second, with about eight customers. Talking about the current scenario, Abhilash said,

We are currently serving customers from the US, India, Canada, Spain, Germany, other European countries, Russia and south-east Asia. The traffic that we are currently processing comes from almost all of the countries in the world. From a customer acquisition point of view, our focus will remain on the entire world, with significant emphasis on US markets.

Sector overview and future plans

“Bot protection is an emerging space, and we believe that it has large global market potential. We are impressed with the InfiSecure team and are happy to partner with them in this journey,” said Venkatesh Peddi, Executive Director, IDG Ventures India.

Ganapathy Venugopal, Co-founder and CEO of Axilor, believes that the demand for cybersecurity solutions is on the rise among online businesses to protect them from growing bot traffic. He is also confident that InfiSecure's team is well placed to solve this problem.

Founded in 2011, Distil Networks is one of the mature players in the space that protects web applications from bad bots, API abuse, and fraud. In August 2016, the venture had raised a $21 million series C round. Closer home in India, SheildSquare is another interesting player in the bot protection space.

With the funds raised, InfiSecure plans to invest more on research and global business development. The team noted that there would be a strong focus on technology innovation to cover more aspects of website protection. Infisecure had earlier informed YourStory that they would soon be launching their second product for click fraud prevention. Talking about their tech capabilities, Ashish Kumar Singh, CTO at InfiSecure, said,

The platform is built on a scalable architecture, with strong focus on big data and machine learning technologies. We would remain a technology-first and innovation-driven company. R&D will remain a focus point for us in the next year, post the current funding round.

While the US is a key focus market, InfiSecure also aims to explore the Australian and UK markets in the near future, as they show a lot of promise.

Website- Infisecure