Sift Science Raises $4M in Series A Funding

Sift Science, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a fraud-fighting service based on machine learning, raised $4m in Series A funding.

The round was led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from Rich Barton (Zillow, Expedia), Chris Dixon (Hunch, SiteAdvisor) and existing investors.
The company previously raised $1.5m in seed funding from Dixon, Max Levchin (PayPal, Slide), Founder Collective, Marc Benioff (Salesforce), SV Angel, Start Fund, Alex Rampell (TrialPay, SiteAdvisor), Kevin Scott (LinkedIn), Lee Linden (Karma Science), Garry Tan (Posterous, Y Combinator), Harj Taggar (Y Combinator), and Alexis Ohanian (Reddit, Y Combinator).
In conjunction with this funding, Albert Wenger, Union Square, is joining the company’s board.

The company intends to use the capital for hires new sales people and engineers (read here) and platform development.

Co-founded June 2011 by Brandon Ballinger and Jason Tan, Sift Science fights fraud leveraging large-scale machine learning. Machine learning lets a computer program recognize patterns of fraudulent behavior based on past examples. The company’s system has learned fraud patterns, including specific page navigation sequences, IP ranges, email address patterns, graph connectivity structures, browser configurations, and writing styles that predict fraudulent activity.
The service is targeting online marketplaces, payment networks, and e-commerce sites, which can integrate Sift Science’s service by adding a snippet of JavaScript code to their sites.
Sift Science participated in Y Combinator’s Summer 2011 program.

FinSMEs

20/03/2013

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