Forter, an Israeli cyber startup developing fraud prevention solutions for the eCommerce sphere, announced the closing of one of the biggest funding rounds ever seen in the Israeli high-tech ecosystem. The Series F round, totaling $300 million, was led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from Third Point Ventures and Adage Capital Management, alongside existing investors, including Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, March Capital, and Salesforce Ventures. The company’s post-money valuation nearly tripled to $3 billion, just six months after the company hit Unicorn status.

Preventing fraud for your favorite online retailers

Over the last two decades, and even more specifically over the last year, we’ve witnessed the massive transition from brick-and-mortar retailers to the world of eCommerce. If a company doesn’t have an online presence, then it just doesn’t exist. However, with this rise, we also see a sharp increase in fraud and solutions aimed at preventing it. The big problem is that these solutions are often blind to various fraud attempts, which leads to more and more false positive payments - or when a legitimate customer gets denied due to a hint of suspected fraud on the transaction. This problem can be a total business killer, as a customer who was denied will probably never return to shop on the site again.

Forter’s automated system can determine in less than a second if a payment is legitimate, or potential fraud, and not just at point-of-sale, but much before. The platform creates a sort of connected network between eCommerce retailers using the system and fraud prediction research and models, in order to identify potential fraudulent activity building up in real-time.

The company reports that over the last year, in which it has raised $425 million, Forter has added to its customer base a few of the most popular eCommerce websites in the world, including Shein and ASOS.com.

While chatting with Geektime, President and co-founder Liron Damri explained that the company had identified a number of trends after working with some of the world’s biggest online retailers, such as a rise in ransom attacks. Damri also noted that due to regulation change in Europe, which requires ID authorization as part of the transaction, there is a higher bounce rate during the purchasing process for these companies.

Forter was founded in 2013 by Alon Shemesh, Liron Damri, and Michael Reitblat, and has raised $525 million to date. The company said it would use the capital to further develop and expand the company’s product suite.