Bot Fighter Shape Security Raises $26 Million
2.11.2018 securityweek BotNet

Shape Security, a provider of bot protection and anti-automation solutions, today announced that it has raised $26 million in growth capital, bringing the total raised by the Mountain View, California-based company to $132 million.

Founded by former Google, Department of Defense and major defense contractor employees, Shape’s platform helps protect against bots, fraud, and unwanted automation, and can detect and shut down automated attacks in real-time.

According to the company, its platform can “distinguish real users from fraudsters even when criminals use manual methods,” and currently processes more than 500 million transactions each day.

The additional funding will be used to support international growth, the company said.

Shape previously explained to SecurityWeek that its platform takes the advantage away from attackers by implementing real-time polymorphism, or dynamically changing code, to remove the static elements that malware, bots and other automated attacks use to interact with web applications.

“We’re making it the attacker’s problem to figure out how to be able to create a scripted programmatic attack against an application which is constantly rewriting itself,” Shuman Ghosemajumder, Shape Security’s CTO, told SecurityWeek in 2014.

"Today, we continue to use dynamic code to create a powerful defense for 20% of the consumer brands in the Fortune 500, and have evolved the original real-time polymorphism,” Sumit Agarwal, Shape Security co-founder & COO, now tells SecurityWeek.

According to Agarwal, the company has tweaked its platform in three key ways.

“We have evolved past visible changes made to application code in favor of mostly invisible changes made to our own code, which provides more stability," he said. "We have developed extremely powerful code-generation and obfuscation technologies which allow us to deliver unique code on every single pageview, for every single customer transaction we protect. This means that, even if an attacker were to reverse-engineer our code on one of our customer's websites, those learnings would be irrelevant almost immediately.”

Finally, Agarwal explained, the company has “created a self-protecting virtual machine that runs dynamically compiled JavaScript which has proven to be extremely effective at holding attackers at bay."

Norwest Venture Partners led the latest funding round, with new strategic investors JetBlue Technology Ventures and Singtel Innov8. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Venrock, Baseline Ventures, Allegis Capital, Focus Ventures, Epic Ventures, Raging Capital, and Tomorrow Ventures also participated.