Bengaluru-based ShieldSquare, which offers protection to internet properties against bot attacks and web scraping, has raised an undisclosed amount in a Series A round of funding led by Endiya Partners and RPG Ventures.
Besides existing investors StartupXseed Ventures and Venture Highway, Anthill Ventures and a few unnamed angel investors also participated in the round, the firm said in a statement.
The startup, which is operated by Kaalbi Technologies Pvt. Ltd, will use the funding for product development and to expand operations in the US and Europe.
“The application security market continues to evolve, responding to proliferating automated attacks and its growing business and political ramifications†said Abhishek Srivastava, director of Endiya Partners.
In April 2015, the firm had raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from StartupXseed.
In 2014, it had raised around $350,000 in an angel funding round led by Chandu Nair of Chennai Angels, Srini Kopparapu and Sanjay Anandaram. The round also saw participation from redBus co-founders Phanindra Sama, Charan Padmaraju and P Sudhakar; Matrimony.com’s co-founder Murugavel Janakiraman; Freshworks (formerly Freshdesk) co-founder Girish Mathrubootham and Fusioncharts’ founder Pallav Nadhani besides Samir Sood, former M&A head (South Asia & Australia) at Google Inc.
ShieldSquare was founded in 2013 by Pavan Thatha, Vasanth Kumar Gopalakrishnan, Rakesh Thatha, Jyoti Kakatkar and Srikanth Konijeti. It helps online businesses differentiate between human and non-human traffic (bots) on websites and mobile applications.
ShieldSquare claims to be protecting over 60,000 internet properties spread across 70 countries from cyber-threats including web scraping, account takeover, carding, scalping and ad fraud, among others.
“Conventional defense offered by web application firewalls is not sufficient to detect bots and automated attacks,†said Pavan Thatha, CEO of ShieldSquare.
The company counts Axel Springer, Practo, Times Group, Android Central, Carboat Media and Toms Guide among its clients. It claims to have customers in sectors such as ecommerce, media, classifieds, real estate, travel, gaming, auction and healthcare.
RPG Ventures is the venture capital arm of RPG Group and backs early stage companies in technology, healthcare and consumer sectors. The VC firm has backed businesses in the elderly care products, health care services, online consumer and cybersecurity areas, according to its website.
Hyderabad-based Endiya Partners was founded in 2015 by former managing partner at Ventureast Satish Andra along with Ramesh Byrapaneni and Abhishek Srivastava. The venture capital fund invests in technology, healthcare and consumer services.
Its most recent investment was in June when it participated in a $2 million funding round in OnEMI Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd which runs lending startup Kissht.
In November last year, Mumbai-based InfiSecure, a real-time bot detection and protection platform, raised $600,000 (Rs 4.1 crore) in seed funding from IDG Ventures and Axilor Ventures.