Cybersecurity company Radware acquires bot management startup ShieldSquare
Israel-based Radware believes that this acquisition will help it to expand its portfolio with bot management solutions and deepen their integrated portfolio.
ShieldSquare, a Bengaluru-based startup in the bot (automated programs with malicious intent) mitigation and management space is set to be acquired by Radware, a NASDAQ listed cybersecurity player.
The Tel Aviv-headquartered company announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire ShieldSquare and reports suggest that the transaction is set to close during the first quarter of this year.
In 2017, ShieldSquare had raised a Series A round of funding led by Endiya Partners and RPG Ventures. With this acquisition it’s investors will be taking an exit. Speaking of this, Sateesh Andra, Managing Director Endiya Partners says,
“We have invested, managed and exited product startups like Little Eye Labs (Facebook - U.S), IncNut (istyle - Japan) and now ShieldSquare (Radware - Israel) in the past few years.”
Roy Zisapel, CEO of Radware, believes that this acquisition will allow Radware to expand its product suite with bot management solutions that fit the company’s goal to deepen their integrated portfolio. He says bot management can be a stand-alone product offering and also integrate with Radware’s suite of attack mitigation solutions.
Speaking of why the company chose ShieldSquare, Roy says that the startup has strong tech synergies, advanced machine learning capabilities and a huge opportunity to expand Radware’s existing cloud security services.
The Israeli cybersecurity company will now offer ShieldSquare’s bot management and mitigation product under their new Radware Bot Manager product line.
Founded in 2014 by Srikanth Konijeti, Jyoti Kakatkar, Vasanth Kumar Gopalakrishnan, and Rakesh and Pavan Thatha, ShieldSquare helps online businesses differentiate between human and non-human traffic (bots) on their websites and mobile applications. The startup leverages technology to detect, categorise, and take the right action against malicious bots and to ensure zero false positives.
ShieldSquare claims to process billions of events every day and protect over 60,000 internet properties spread across 70 countries against threats of web scraping, account takeover, form spam, carding, scalping, ad fraud and other forms of bot abuse.
Bots have existed for more than a decade for good reasons but are now being used for various malicious purposes. Reports say that more than half the traffic coming to a website today is non-human, and the majority is malicious. The damage caused by bots and automated attacks severely impacts the competitiveness and growth of businesses.
Pavan, CEO of ShieldSquare, earlier said,
“Conventional defences offered by web application firewalls are not sufficient to detect bots and automated attacks. Shieldsquare’s ability to identify sophisticated bot attacks in real time has made it a preferred partner to online businesses in their fight against malicious bots and automated attacks.”
The are several startups in the bot management space. Founded in 2011, Distil Networks protects web applications from bad bots, API abuse and fraud. In August 2016, it raised a $21 million Series C round. Closer home in India, InfiSecure is a YourStory Tech 30 startup that operates in the bot mitigation and management space. The startup had raised $600,000 in seed funding from IDG Ventures and Axilor Ventures.
