Kasada founder, Sam Crowther
Australian-headquartered cyber security startup, Kasada has scored $6.5 million capital raising from CSIRO-backed venture firm, Main Sequence Ventures and Westpac-backed Reinventure Group.
Kasada claims its Polyform platform detects and mitigates malicious web traffic that other security measures fail to identify, while also protecting websites and web applications from credential stuffing, fraud, account takeover and scraping attacks. The platform also reduces bot-related network bandwidth and infrastructure costs.
The funds will be put towards engineering, research and development, and go-to market expansion, Kasada founder and CEO Sam Crowther explained.
Kasada was born four years ago with Crowther saying it took an idea for better security, and demonstrated its capability in boardrooms across New York and Chicago. The company has offices in Australia and the US.
“A secure digital experience is key to building and retaining trust,” Crowther said. “As cyber criminals increasingly use automation to attack websites and web applications, automation is therefore the key to keeping up where human analysts cannot. Kasada provides protection against the dark web’s inventory of stolen user credentials and automated fraud tools.”
Main Sequence Ventures CSIRO Innovation Fund founder and general partner, Mike Zimmerman will join Kasada’s board of directors with Reinventure Group co-founder and managing director Danny Gilligan who is continuing his advisory role with Kasada’s board.
“Main Sequence aims to partner with Australia’s most ambitious founders solving large, difficult problems, and the ever-increasing challenge of stopping sophisticated cyber attacks certainly qualifies,” Zimmerman said.
Meanwhile, security spending in Australia is expected to reach $3.9 billion in 2019, growing 9.8 per cent, according to data from research firm Gartner. Globally, the market is forecast to grow 8.7 per cent to US$124 billion.
