Our Next Chapter: Powering Trust Online

Today marks an exciting new chapter for Sift Science. We’re launching powerful new products to fight online fraud and abuse, and announcing our $30M Series C.

First, some history. Five years ago, we started Sift Science with a focus on helping online businesses tackle a common and costly problem – payment fraud – by democratizing the same sophisticated machine learning technology that the likes of Amazon, Google, and Facebook use.

Over the years, we’ve learned so much from the 6,000+ websites and apps that protect themselves with Sift Science. First, we learned that customers aren’t satisfied with status quo solutions; they lack innovation, relying instead on static blacklists/whitelists and rules systems that are reactive, expensive, and difficult to scale. These solutions often cast too wide of a net, compromising the business with tedious, unnecessary manual review and a suboptimal end user experience (e.g., captchas, overzealous password prompts, delayed fulfillment, etc). The internet deserves better.

Second, we learned that fraud is bigger and broader than we first suspected – it’s a trust issue inherent to all kinds of online businesses, not just e-commerce. Depressingly, bad actors also steal, scam, and spam online communities, marketplaces, and content sites. All businesses share a common problem: how do you know which users you can and cannot trust?

Third, we learned that each type of fraud often warrants its own unique resolution – e.g., you may want to permanently block a money launderer from creating an account on your site, but only prevent an annoying spammer from posting content. Finally, we learned that, rather than purchasing, implementing, and managing several different vendors, our customers preferred one versatile solution that scaled with their unique business challenges every step of the way, even as they expanded into new geographies and launched new products.

We want to help our customers make the most accurate, automated decisions about who to trust, in real time. To that end, we’re excited to share our most significant launch to date: a suite of products to prevent Payment Fraud, Account Abuse, Content Abuse, and Promo Abuse. Better yet, this is all built on a unified, flexible machine learning platform that scales with your business. Additionally, we’re launching Workflows – highly configurable, data-driven business logic features that enable risk teams to dynamically automate how they respond to bad actors.

So much has happened since our Series B two years ago. Our customer base grew 6X, we added 30+ new Sifties (that’s what we call ourselves), and our revenue has increased by 15X. But we’re just getting started, and that’s why we’re thrilled to announce our $30M Series C round led by Insight Venture Partners. We want to power online trust, and IVP has deep expertise in helping companies scale globally. We will invest this capital to grow our team and serve more customers all around the world. To our customers – thank you. We appreciate your support and feedback. Please keep it coming.

If you’re interested in helping us make the internet a better place – we’re hiring. And if you need help with a fraud or abuse problem – let us know!