Glasswing Portfolio Company Allure Security Secures $6.8M in Seed Funding
We are delighted to share the news that Glassing Ventures’ portfolio company Allure Security has secured $6.8M in seed funding. Allure Security helps organizations safeguard their digital brand, lowering fraud costs, reducing the workload for their security teams, and preventing their customers, employees, and partners from becoming victims of fraud. They are tackling what Javelin Strategy & Research and Juniper Research analysts have identified as a $76 billion fight against digital fraud and online brand abuse.
Allure Security’s journey has been a fascinating one, and we are proud to have played a foundational role in their success. As part of Glasswing’s thesis of investing in AI and frontier technology startups in enterprise and cybersecurity, our interest was piqued early on when Founder and CTO Dr. Salvatore Stolfo, Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, and his star former Ph.D. student Dr. Shlomo Hershkop applied artificial intelligence to the tracking of online criminal activity, effectively shutting down these threats before they could cause damage as part of a project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security at Columbia University’s Intrusion Detection Systems Lab.
Glasswing became Allure Security’s first institutional and lead investor to commercialize this technology, and shortly thereafter we were joined by other high-value investors including Zetta Venture Partners and Portage Partners.
Since our initial investment, Allure Security has evolved to detect the creation and deployment of fraudulent websites, taking them down before they can cause damage. These websites can be malicious clones of retail banks, online brokerages, crypto exchanges, eCommerce companies, or corporate websites. They intend to deceive customers, employees, or partners of a brand into entering their credentials and having those credentials harvested and used to defraud those individual’s accounts — whether for stealing cryptocurrency, money in a bank account or brokerage account, or breaking into an organization and stealing intellectual property.
Allure Security is uniquely able to detect these websites when compared to legacy approaches and domain monitoring services that just look for suspicious domain names that closely resemble those of the legitimate brand. Malicious attackers have become more sophisticated and can avoid these detection techniques. By looking at how the site is constructed, applying AI to facets including the site’s images and layout, going well beyond just the domain naming convention, Allure Security can detect these malicious clones in short order, such that the threat caused by these sites is eliminated before it can cause harm to an organization or their customers.
Today’s funding announcement would not be possible without recognizing Allure Security’s leadership team. In 2020, we were excited to bring Josh Shaul on board as CEO to lead the go-to-market effort to commercialize the technology for detecting fraudulent websites. We knew Josh from his years leading the web security group at Akamai and Glasswing’s work in the security community. Josh was excited about solving the familiar problems of e-commerce fraud, banking fraud, brokerage fraud, and credential harvesting. His expertise in identifying these areas made him an ideal fit.
In addition, Glasswing brought Jack Hembrough into the company, where he now serves as the Chairman of the Board of Directors. Jack has spent his career leading security companies and driving their growth. He has served as a director of Resilient Systems (sold to IBM), and led Application Security, Inc., as President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board from its inception through its merger with Trustwave (SingTel). His expertise has been invaluable to the team.
With this core team in place, in 2021, Allure Security was able to scale revenue and attain significant customer traction to achieve this latest round. We are thrilled with the company’s progress and the successful fundraise.
Congratulations to Josh, Jack, Sal, Shlomo, and the entire Allure Security team. Today marks the start of another exciting chapter in Allure Security’s compelling story, and we are delighted to continue our investment. We welcome Gutbrain Ventures, PBJ Capital, and Impellent Ventures, and look forward to continuing to work with Zetta Venture Partners and Portage Partners to propel the company’s growth in 2022 and beyond.
Read Allure Security CEO Josh Shaul’s blog here and Allure Security’s funding news announcement here.
