Today our portfolio company Sift Science announced not only their $30 million Series C, led by Insight Venture Partners, but also several new product offerings. This is exciting because it reveals the team’s larger vision of “Powering Trust Online” and makes that concrete by going beyond payments fraud to address content, promo and account abuse. These products have been developed with customers and are available now (content abuse, promo abuse, account abuse).
Sift’s execution is a great illustration of what I refer to as having a “big vision and an on-ramp,” when people ask me what it takes to build a big business. The idea of fighting many different types of fraud and thus helping to create trust on the internet was always what excited the team and us as investors. But when you have a very big vision it can often be challenging to get started. A common failure mode for startups is to try to solve lots of problems all at once and as a result not solve any of them well.
Instead, Sift Science remained focused on payment fraud as their on-ramp for several years. This focus helped build a superior service and a wonderful customer base and along with it a massive data set. Sift applies machine learning techniques to this data to provide realtime decisions at scale. As we had originally expected, it turns out the same approach and much of the same data works well for other types of fraud.
Congratulations to the entire team at Sift and a warm welcome to Insight Venture Partners as a new investor. For everyone looking to join the exciting mission of building trust on the internet, Sift Science is hiring!
