Ten Eleven Ventures Leads the Round as Managing Partner Alex Doll Joins Kasada Board
Kasada has raised $US10 million in Series B funding. The New York and Sydney-based company plans to use the proceeds to fuel its continued rapid U.S. expansion and new product development. Cybersecurity venture capital specialist Ten Eleven Ventures led the round, joined by existing investors CSIRO’s Main Sequence Ventures and Westpac’s venture capital arm, Reinventure. The company also announced that Ten Eleven’s Managing Partner Alex Doll has joined Kasada’s board of directors.
Founded in Australia by Sam Crowther in 2015, Kasada staked its claim to the U.S. market in 2019 with the establishment of its New York-based U.S. headquarters and the naming of veteran cyber industry executive Pascal Podvin as CEO. Today’s announcement will fuel Kasada’s next phase of expansion, allow Kasada to build out its sales and marketing organization and enable it to continue to invest in new product development.
Podvin described the company’s offer as “a new-generation solution that puts internet control and safety back in the hands of human beings.”
Crowther shared that, “Kasada’s solution invisibly foils even the most pernicious and often unsuspected cyber traffic problems, while preserving an effortless customer journey. Many companies use CDN or WAF, or legacy cybersecurity vendors to protect against malicious automation. When we entered the market, the norm seemed to be incomplete, inefficient, easy-to-detect tools that are not only inadequate, but also costly to deploy and maintain, as well as adding friction and latency to the user experience.” Kasada delivers a solution specifically architected to address the biggest online business challenges—data-scraping and API security for a variety of markets, including ecommerce, hospitality and financial services.
According to Kasada, its U.S. expansion is on track and the company’s revenue grew 200% in Q1 2020, in spite of COVID 19 challenges across all sectors of the economy.
As additional evidence of its traction in the U.S., Kasada cited Hyatt’s choice of their software. “At Hyatt, our purpose – we care for people so they can be their best – informs all business decisions, including our technology investments. When evaluating technology providers, we selected Kasada’s solution for its innovative architecture and its immersive 24/7 customer service that is best characterized as ‘embedded,’” said Benjamin Vaughn, Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Hyatt. “Their managed service solution goes beyond traditional models. As a global hospitality brand that welcomes travelers from all over the world, it’s critical that we collaborate with technology providers that understand our immediate and long-term imperatives, and we truly value the way Kasada’s product further strengthens our technology systems and platforms that our guests use every day.”
“Today, as online business increasingly becomes the main or even the only viable channel, there is an attendant surge in scraping and other automated and often undetected attacks that target the most strategic and vital issues facing companies—from their competitiveness and stock value, to their brand and their ability to understand their customer segments. Defending against scraping and the damage it inflicts should be on the agenda of every C-level business executive and every board room,” said Podvin.
Kasada points to Intellectual Property (IP) and price scraping as creating direct, persistent, on-going damage, for instance by preventing businesses from selling when their prices are systematically undercut. Scraping issues, often unseen and unknown, are not just CISO-level concerns.
“Bot-driven cyber attacks are costlier and more problematic than most businesses realize. When we met the Kasada team, we immediately understood the potential in their elegant new approach, dedicated to defending enterprises against hostile synthetic traffic and continuously protecting the most critical assets of businesses. We are greatly encouraged by Kasada’s traction and what we heard from early customers about Kasada’s superior solution. We look forward to helping them as they expand globally,” said Ten Eleven’s Alex Doll.
