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Shape enables large enterprises and government customers to defend against advanced automated bot attacks on their web and mobile apps

Automated threats are responsible for millions in fraud losses per day, targeting web and mobile applications of retailers, banks, airlines, healthcare organisations and government agencies. Existing defenses cannot stop cyber criminals, who use increasingly automated tools to imitate populations of legitimate users to carry out Credential Stuffing (resulting in large-scale account takeovers), application DDoS attacks, content scraping, and other threats.

There are very few companies in the world that are capable of protecting enterprises from highly sophisticated bot attacks that mimic human behaviour.

US-based Shape Security is one such company that has just announced a US$40 million in Series D round of funding led by Singapore’s EDBI, with participation from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

This is EDBI’s second announcement in less than 24 hours, following its investment in cloud security company Druva Inc.

With EDBI’s investment, Shape plans to expand their Asia presence through Singapore. The company also intends to work with Singapore-based data centre partners to better serve their Asian customers.

Also Read: 5 tips to protect your online business from cyber criminals

“Over the past year, we’ve scaled the capabilities of technology and now we’re looking forward to further scaling our business,” said Derek Smith, CEO of Shape Security. “With this new investment from EDBI, we’ll be able to support more organisations in the APAC region to defend against automated (bot) attacks.”

Shape has previously raised US$25 million in funding from existing investors Baseline Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, NVP, Venrock, Google Ventures, and Eric Schmidt, as well as Northern Light Ventures.

The latest round brings Shape’s total funding to $106 million since being founded in late 2011.

Founded in 2011 and based in California, Shape is an info-security company that enables large enterprises and government customers to defend against advanced automated bot attacks on their web and mobile sites. It employs a novel approach to protect its customers, unlike existing reactive solutions that are ineffective against highly sophisticated bots which mimic human behaviour.

Shape’s unique value proposition is its suite of advanced countermeasures, which are effective against sophisticated “human-like” bots orchestrated by organised crime and state-sponsored actors that can bypass signatures, heuristics or rules-based approaches. These advanced counter-measures detect the absence of human activity within web and mobile traffic, so as to deflect a wide range of automated website and mobile attacks, including Credential Stuffing/Account Hijacking, Content Scraping, Application DDoS and Man-in-the-Browser, etc.

Its solution can be deployed either as a physical or virtual appliance co-located with the enterprise’s protected website or service, or through a cloud-based platform hosted by partners.

To date, Shape claims to have prevented more than US$1.1 billion in fraud losses for its Fortune 500 and government customers. Its clients include airline companies, hotels, banks, retailers and government agencies.

Shape’s mobile solution, formally launched in January of 2016, now protects more than 20 percent of all in-store mobile payments worldwide.

With Singapore’s position as a key data centre hub in Asia which hosts many key MNCs and financial institutes, Shape’s strong security pedigree will help to protect against threat of automated attacks on these companies and institutes’ website and mobile applications. It will be a strong addition to Singapore’s info-security ecosystem, and help develop key info-security engineering capabilities.

“As automated attacks on web and mobile sites become more prevalent and harder to defend against with existing solutions, we believe Shape Security’s highly innovative cybersecurity platform can be a game changer that offers enterprises real-time protection against such threats,” said CHU Swee Yeok, CEO and President of EDBI. “We are pleased that Shape is leveraging Singapore to access Asian customers and partners in the region to advance their global growth strategy.”

Last month, EDBI backed the US-based security intelligence company LogRhythm.

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