UPDATED 12:02 EDT / MAY 04 2017

BIG DATA

Fraud detection startup Signifyd raises $56M round led by Bain Capital

With e-commerce accounting for a rapidly growing portion of the retail industry’s revenue, merchants are investing heavily to protect their online storefronts from scammers. Signifyd Inc. is one of the startups working to capitalize on the trend.

The San Jose, California-based fraud detection provider announced today that it’s bolstering its efforts with $45 million in fresh funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Menlo Ventures and several other returning investors. Signifyd has a total of $95 million so far to fuel the adoption of its payment validation service, which helps retailers identify scammers using machine learning technology.

The company’s website doesn’t provide much information about how the technology works, but Chief Executive Rajesh Ramanand offered a small glimpse under the hood in an interview last year. He said that Signifyd assesses “thousands of different data points” in a bid to determine the validity of transactions with as much accuracy as possible. A similarly thorough approach is employed by Fraugster Ltd., a German fraud detection startup that raised $5 million in seed funding earlier this year.

One of the ways Signify sets itself apart is by providing a financial guarantee for payments scanned by its service. Merchants can ask for reimbursement within 48 hours of discovering a fraudulent transaction and receive a full refund, which seems to be an indication of Signifyd’s confidence in its technology more than anything. Ramanand said in the interview that his startup’s technology can provide savings equivalent to several percentage points of a retailer’s gross revenue.

Signifyd’s pitch is attracting a lot of attention in the e-commerce world. The startup has seen sales increase more than 450 percent over the past year on the back of a twentyfold jump in the volume of transactions processed through its platform. It boasts more than 5,000 clients, including publicly traded e-commerce companies such as Chegg Inc. and Wayfair LLC.

Image: Signifyd

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