Impermium acquired by Google
impermium.comFrom Crunchbase:
Impermium is a cybersecurity technology startup that protects over 1.5M sites and has processed over 8B total transactions in its 3-year history. The company’s advanced risk-evaluation platform improves account management by identifying fraudulent registrations, compromised logins, and risky transactions. It has proven successful at stopping fraudulent user account registrations in real-time — using a blend of machine learning, statistical anomaly detection, and a proprietary database of malicious actors — for hundreds of transactions per second from many of the largest consumer Internet companies.
It looks like it was founded in 2010 by a few ex-Yahoo! spam guys and had raised $9mm in 2 rounds from the typical list of tech VCs. LinkedIn lists 20 employees, so probably 30ish total.
Is it just me or does anyone else feel lile they're thanking their customers for being guinea pigs for experimenting their WIP.systems. That the end game was always a Google acquisition and these customers were just a way to prove that something of value had been built. Now that it is done, so long, and thanks for all the fish.
Okay, why the negative votes? Just read their announcement. It reads like a farewell note to their current customers (at least to me).
I read your comment as being a cynical.
Playing devil's advocate, assuming what you are saying is correct (customers were guinea pigs and this was all about the exit) - its really tough not sounding like a douche.
When writing that sort of copy, you have to always take the high road.
the customers got something out of it too, no?
But perhaps not a business partner in it for the long term that they might have hoped for.
when I buy a service I don't expect a business partner. I'm not sure why other people do -- anyone got some good reading on this (admittedly nebulous) topic?
So does that mean you always have a contingency plan for every service going away without warning? Also, are you calling about $30 a month accounts for things affecting you, or are you talking about $1000 a month services that provide benefits that are felt by your customers?
best $7K spent:
http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/21/impermium/
"Rather than use an internal data services team, the company turned to Kaggle, a startup that hosts data-driven competitions.
From around the world, statisticians competed to build a tool that combines machine learning and natural language processing to root out malicious commentary. The winner received $7,000 — their solution was the most accurate with a false positive rate of less than one percent.
After posting the competition, the company received 154 submissions from contenders, and made some interesting discoveries about the nature of hate speech. "
They probably spent twice that - Kaggle takes a cut.
Mental Summarize:
Impermium is Joining Google!
January 15, 2014
When we founded Impermium three years ago, our mission was to help rid the web of spam, fraud, and abuse. By joining Google, our team will extend a special thank you to Accel Partners, AOL Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Data Collective, Freestyle Capital, Greylock Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Morado Ventures, and the Social+Capital Partnership.
So what exactly did they do?
From TC: "[Impermium] had been building a risk-evaluation platform that would improve account management by identifying fraudulent registrations, compromised logins, and risky transactions"
I think they were used by Tumblr for anti-spam and catching bad registrations.
Impermium protects SaaS application users from account hijacking and account compromise.
so what exactly did they do?
Livefyre was one of their early users. Every comment submitted into any comment widget hosted by Livefyre was sent over to Impermium for spam analysis. Impermium had a pretty cool 2 phase process where they'd give you a rough spam score within seconds and then a more accurate score within minutes.
Livefyre had some sophisticated behavior as a result. Comments were always pushed live to other page viewers immediately while simultaneously sent to Impermium, then revoked (via live update) if either the first or second pass through Impermium resulted in a spam indication. Email notifications weren't released until the second pass indicated nonspam.
Not sure if Livefyre still uses Impermium today or what this buyout may mean for them, but I always thought the concept was pretty cool.
Disqus did (does?) use Impermium as well.
I guess burn some VC cash for a while and then get acquihired.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know how much they were acquired for, seeing has Google dropped ~3 billion on Nest..
I don't think I've ever seen anyone round off 200 million dollars before.
Google is on a shopping spree, Eh?!