Human Security, a tech startup here in NYC looking to make bots and other fraudulent online activity a thing of the past, just took to LinkedIn to announce that it has raised $100 million in fresh growth funding. The round was led by WestCap, with participation from NightDragon, and caps off a year of massive growth for Human and the larger cybersecurity industry.
Bots have become a persistent and malicious reality of the internet, affecting everything from politics to commerce as they get better and better at imitating real humans. Their presence isn’t just annoying though, they also undermine companies’ ability to do business online effectively, which hurts their bottom line.
“The bot problem is one of the most important cybersecurity problems of modern times and verifying humanity is fundamental to the security and integrity of the internet as we know it,” co-founder and CEO Tamer Hassan said in a recent blog post, adding that the majority of security and fraud incidents today use bots. “Our mantra is simple — stop the bots, stop the threats.”
Human does this by using machine learning and other threat intelligence techniques to passively detect malicious bots that mimic human behavior in an effort to stop cyber crime before it happens. The platform has been in especially high demand in the last year as bots and other security threats become more prolific across the internet, causing Human’s revenue to double year over year, according to the company.
This level of growth is true of the entire cybersecurity space, which saw unprecedented levels of funding last year amid high profile attacks like those on SolarWinds and the Colonial Pipeline. To keep up, Hassan says Human will use this fresh funding to continue its international expansion. The company also appears to be in the midst of a hiring spree, with more than a dozen open tech positions available now.
