Kasada Gets $23M Investment Toward Bot Protection

Kasada has announced a $23 million series C funding round and says it’s seeing more demand for its bot protection tech, which can stop automated attacks, the company announced Monday (Dec. 6).

Kasada purports to be able to do away with the attacks without requiring cumbersome CAPTCHA tests, which the company says are easily beaten by both fraudsters and bots and tend to annoy people.

The bot attacks include things like distributed denial of service (DDOS), content scraping and online fraud. They’ve grown more ubiquitous since the pandemic and especially in 2021, given that the volume of attacks has risen 41% in the first half of this year, data from LexisNexis Risk Solutions finds.

Bot attacks can be expensive for businesses, costing them 3.6% of their revenue on average, per data from Netacea.

Kasada’s solution purports to “rapidly adapt” to fight new online threats. This will come without a need for manual intervention through the aforementioned CAPTCHAs. Through using machine learning capabilities, Kasada will be able to protect web, mobile and application programming interface (API) channels and will stop attacks in real-time, the report says.

In a VentureBeat report, Kasada founder and CEO Sam Crowther said the evolution of bot attacks necessitated new ways to fight back, rather than the now-ineffective things like internet protocol (IP) addresses, device fingerprinting or behavioral analytics, which are out of date.

“Modern bots look and act just like humans,” Crowther said. “They disguise themselves with residential proxy networks, new developer tools such as Puppeteer and Playwright, anti-detect browsers, customized stealth plugins and digital harvesting techniques — all of which make them even more difficult to detect.”

Kasada also says it does not require risk scores or configuring rules, and also is easier to use than other such programs which have needs for specialized resources to manage them.

PYMNTS has reported on malicious bot activity during shopping, including bots that log into retail sites and check out items. That has increased 19% just in the past few months, between Sept. 4 and Oct. 26, per data from networking services company Akamai.

There are also “scalping bots,” which are made specifically to search for hard-to-find items and buying them automatically, likely to be sold elsewhere.

Read more: Malicious Shopping Bots Top the Naughty List for Holiday 2021 eCommerce