They have jointly invested fifteen million dollars in the further growth of the Czech cybersecurity startup. The investment fund Springtide Ventures from the empire of billionaire Karel Komárek, the company’s largest investor to date, also continues to believe in ThreatMark’s potential, having first financed the startup in 2017 and provided the remaining eight million dollars in this investment round in the form of a convertible loan.
“The new capital injection will help us accelerate global growth,” says Michal Tresner, CEO of the Brno-based startup. ThreatMark will use the funds to expand its market reach and accelerate research and development. Over the past twelve months, ThreatMark has managed to grow by 75 percent in the ARR parameter, i.e. annual recurring revenue. Twelve out of fifteen Czech banks use its services, and the startup has customers not only in Europe, but also in the United States, Latin America, Canada and Asia. With the new investment, it is preparing to fully penetrate the British market.
“We want to expand the team with engineers and programmers who have experience with large-scale data processing, in the thousands of terabytes, and with high-performance computing,” adds Kryštof Hilar, CTO and co-founder of ThreatMark. Huge volumes of data and working with them are important for the Brno-based company. It detects financial fraud with the help of artificial intelligence, behavioral biometrics and real-time risk analysis.
How does ThreatMark do it? While you’re banking online, your phone and computer are constantly collecting data about you, creating something like your biometric signature or digital fingerprint – a unique set of data that corresponds to how you normally behave on the device, how you swipe your finger across the screen, click on icons, move your mouse, what your geolocation says, or what your language settings are.
The whole thing is of course many times more complex than we’re briefly describing here, and well-trained deep learning algorithms play a key role in it. There are many more parameters monitored, and the result is that ThreatMark can identify you – and recognize and warn you when someone else is in your banking.
“The ThreatMark team has deep expertise in combating fraud in financial services,” says Jonathan Drillings, a partner at Riverside Acceleration Capital, which led the investment with Octopus Ventures. “They have been able to integrate the knowledge into their own technologies that address the growing risk of fraud, and have tools against it for a wide range of banks and other financial institutions.”
“Mobile banking fraud will continue to be a significant threat to the financial sector – and ThreatMark is poised to play an increasingly important role in combating it,” adds Paul Davidson, Partner at Octopus Ventures.
