Announcing Our Series C Round

I am excited to announce today that we have closed a $40 million Series C round of financing. The round was led by Sequoia China with participation from existing investors New Enterprise Associates and GSR Ventures.

This new funding will enable us to accelerate the development of our current solutions as well as build out product lines to address new use cases. We will also expand our marketing, sales and customer success teams globally in order to offer our solutions to more customers.

The State of Online Fraud

Cybercrime and online fraud is on the rise, with more and more consumers and businesses being affected every year. In response, there is a rapidly growing market for advanced solutions to protect businesses from these threats. According to research firm MarketsandMarkets, the global fraud detection and prevention market will be valued at 41.6 billion by year 2022.  

This trend is driven by several macro factors:

• The explosion of online services – both new businesses as well as existing brick-and-mortar moving online
• Increasing sophistication of fraudsters using technology and tools to conduct complex attacks at scale
• The broader surface area of personal information online that can be compromised through data breaches

In the past year, businesses have suffered a number of high profile data breaches exposing users’ personal information such as tax identification numbers, email addresses, date of birth, driver’s license information, voter records and more. This information can be used by fraudsters to take over accounts, apply for fraudulent accounts in a person’s name, or conduct social engineering to get access to additional information.

Consumers’ online identity and personal data are highly vulnerable today, and will become increasingly at risk in the future. The internet will become a more dangerous place without better solutions to identify and put a stop to the malicious activity.

Our Vision

DataVisor started with a vision of transforming the way that businesses fight fraud. During the time that my co-founder Fang and I worked together at Microsoft Research, we saw the increasingly diverse and sophisticated attacks being conducted against online services. It became clear to us that existing fraud detection solutions are not able to cope with the rapidly evolving threats in today’s digital world.

We founded DataVisor in 2013 with the mission of applying the latest developments in AI and machine learning to protect the world’s internet properties and financial institutions from fraud and abuse. Instead of having thousands of rules to manually maintain, this new solution will automatically learn new patterns and update its detection in real-time. Instead of waiting after damage is done to notice a new pattern of attack, the algorithm will identify previously unknown threats without human intervention or historical data, and block them before the damage has time to spread.

Fast forward 4 years, we now work with some of the world’s largest internet properties and financial institutions such as Pinterest, Yelp, Alibaba Group, Cheetah Mobile, Toutiao, Tokopedia and more. With this new round of funding, we hope to extend our services to more enterprises globally to protect their businesses and consumers.

Our Team

Looking back on the past several years, it amazes me how far we have come. When Fang and I embarked on our journey 4 years ago, we only had two desks in a startup incubator. Now our team numbers 75 people across three offices and four countries, with more growth planned over the next year. We recently moved into our new headquarters office in Mountain View, CA in anticipation of our next phase of growth. Our team in China is also growing rapidly, and we moved to a new office in the heart of Beijing along with opening a regional office in Shanghai.

None of the success we have seen so far would have been possible without our people. We have an amazing team that is great at what we do and committed to the success of our customers. We love technology, we innovate continuously, we set a high bar and work hard to achieve it, we focus on getting things done right – all while having fun along the way. I am truly proud of the team we have at DataVisor, and I am committed to upholding our culture and values as we scale our company.

In closing, I would like to thank everyone who has been with us so far on our journey – customers, partners, employees and investors. It has been an exciting trip so far, and I look forward to continuing our journey together for many miles to come.

– Yinglian Xie, CEO and Co-Founder