San Jose-based enterprise fraud protection company ThreatMetrix is announcing an $18 million Series D funding round today, led by August Capital and also including Tenaya Capital,US Venture Partners and CM Capital. The company, which acquired malware protection firm TrustDefender in late 2011, plans to use the funding to support its growth, ThreatMetrix president and CEO Reed Taussig told BetaKit in an interview.
“ThreatMetrix is growing at 300 percent per year so we do need to have working capital to support that growth,” Taussig said. But when asked, he also admitted that future strategic acquisitions, like the TrustDefender purchase, are definitely on the table. “We are very much open to future acquisitions that would be product, as opposed to distribution, oriented,” he said. “Potential target acquisitions would fall into mobile products as well as data analytics products if the opportunity presents itself.”
That would definitely fall within the realm of ThreatMetrix’s game plan, which is to provide companies with an anti-fraud solution that not only closely monitors device access of a client site, but also watches out for malware installation.
“The cost of installation is far less than installing separate products from separate vendors as are the costs of maintenance and ongoing support,” Taussig explains when describing the advantage of their offering. “In the end, why would you want to buy a device ID product that cannot detect malware or visa-versa; why would you want to buy a malware detection product that cannot detect device anomalies such as hidden proxies or other factors?”
The approach is uniquely well-suited to helping companies securely manage remote employees who embrace the bring-your-own-device trend, which is an area where Taussig has been seeing tremendous growth with no signs of slowing. The advent of tablets definitely adds to that trend, and the potential security risks involved, Taussig noted, and he said in some cases they produce unique risks, like being less easy to tell apart from one another from a network access perspective than notebooks. Still, he says ThreatMetrix is staying on top of the increasing popularity of tablets from a solution engineering perspective.
ThreatMetrix’s funding round is a clear message that enterprise security is very much a top-of-mind concern these days, and Taussig’s emphasis on BYOD trends in our interview suggests that with the use of consumer smartphones and tablets on the rise, there’s nothing standing in the way of continued demand for these types of services.
