Darwinium, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a digital security and fraud prevention platform, just raised $18m in Series A financing. In conjunction with the deal, CEO Alisdair Faulkner answered our questions about his background, the product, the funding, and future plans.
FinSMEs: Hi Alisdair, can you tell us a bit more about yourself? What’s your background?
I have a passion for social justice and equity for all, dedicating my life to building solutions that protect those least able to protect themselves. Darwinium is really the culmination of this vision to make the digital world safe, fair, and accessible to everyone.
I am an engineer at heart; always looking for simple ways to solve complex problems. I completed my Master’s degree in Engineering at Adelaide University, where winning the Software Engineering prize lit the fire of creating great products that solve real world problems.
My first company, NetPriva, pioneered mission critical network performance management with Tier-1 customers including VW Bank, Bridgestone, KBR Haliburton, Saab, and DaimlerChrysler. It was acquired by Expand Networks 2008, and subsequently Riverbed.
Prior to Darwinium, I co-founded, built, and scaled ThreatMetrix, the world’s leading Digital Identity company. As ThreatMetrix grew, it protected 1 in 3 ecommerce transactions in the US, and over 1 billion global accounts across 4 billion devices for the world’s largest global banks and brands. With the team at ThreatMetrix, I created the Digital Identity category and grew recurring revenues from $0-100M USD, resulting in a $830M USD acquisition by LexisNexis Risk Solutions in 2018. I then went on to manage the global fraud and identity business for the US, Canada, LATAM, APAC, UK and EMEA, further expanding the protection we offered to customers and consumers alike.
FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Darwinium. What is the market problem you want to solve? What is the real opportunity?
In many ways, Darwinium is the company I have been building my whole life. It unites digital security with fraud prevention at the perimeter edge, delivering continuous customer protection to businesses that are currently losing the battle against complex fraud. It provides complete visibility of customer behavior across every digital touchpoint, with the ability to decision and act on trust and risk in real time. This gives businesses the power to remediate evolving fraud in real time, without the burden of a complex deployment.
The challenge with the current fraud landscape is that there are several great solutions providing fraud detection capabilities at key moments in the customer journey, but most lack visibility across the complete customer journey. Those that do have journey-level orchestration capabilities don’t then have the ability to decision, and act, on what they are seeing. Darwinium does both, which is a game changer for companies that are looking for simpler ways to solve complex fraud more effectively.
Darwinium provides complete account security, from new account creation, to login, to payment, but is uniquely positioned to understand user behavior across the customer journey, so that interactions at browsing or login, can be used to better inform risk decisions at checkout/payment, for example. This means we can detect high-risk behavior indicative of an account takeover, identity fraud, bonus abuse scenarios, and fraudulent uploads/content abuse. It is also particularly useful for the challenge of detecting sophisticated scams because it doesn’t just look at the payment interaction, but at the customer’s behavior across an entire payment journey, to better detect for signs of social engineering or coercion.
FinSMEs: What are the features differentiating the product from competitors?
Darwinium has been designed as a comprehensive, extensible platform that can ingest any third-party data to better inform trust and risk decisions. This means it partners really well with existing security, fraud, identity, and authentication solutions, making it easier for customers to leverage their current investments.
Darwinium becomes the risk decision platform of record: providing complete journey level visibility of user behavior but then conditionally enriching this intelligence when required, for example selectively invoking step-up authentication.
The key difference with existing journey orchestration players is that Darwinium then provides the ability to decision, and remediate user journeys in real time, all from within the platform. And this can be done in an automated way, so that, if a user is displaying high-risk behavior, they can be blocked, re-routed, or stepped up, offered a special promotion or given a frictionless experience, if they are a trusted returning user.
FinSMEs: You just raised a new Series A funding round. Please, tell us more about it.
We’re incredibly excited about this funding announcement. We have an amazing team of investors, led by U.S. Venture Partners. It’s also great to have the support of our existing investors Blackbird, and Airtree Ventures, who have already played a pivotal part of our journey as we have built, launched and grown Darwinium. In combination with our angel investors, this group of industry experts are helping us to develop our vision to scale Darwinium globally.
FinSMEs: Can you share some numbers and achievements of the business?
We are already working with some of the largest eCommerce merchants and fintechs globally, delivering innovations that the industry is asking for to better solve their security and fraud challenges.
Industry experts recognize the value and innovation of what Darwinium brings to the market. We have been named as a Representative Vendor for Online Fraud Detection in the 2022 Gartner® Market Guide for Online Fraud Detection, and a Representative Vendor with emerging orchestration capabilities in the 2022 Gartner Innovation Insight: Journey Time Orchestration Mitigates Fraud Risk and Delivers Better UX report.
The Darwinium team also won the prestigious Merchant Risk Council (MRC) Ignite Award for 2023. The team beat all other vendors who demonstrated different compelling innovations in the payments and fraud prevention industry. Our presentation showcased Darwinium’s innovation of delivering digital security and fraud prevention at the edge, through the lens of a David Attenborough dystopia.
