UPDATED 07:00 EDT / AUGUST 02 2016

NEWS

Distil Networks raises $21M to fight bad bots

Most of the startups that include the word “bot” in their mission statements nowadays focus on chat-based artificial intelligence, but Distil Networks Inc. is different. The outfit develops software for protecting websites from automated attacks and other non-human threats that has helped it attract $21 million in venture funding this morning.

The investment saw the participation of Silicon Valley Bank and four of the backers that contributed to Distil’s previous financing round last year, namely Bessemer Venture Partners, Foundry Group, and TechStars. The startup achieved several major milestones in the 13-month period between the two cash infusions. It acquired a competitor called ScrapeSentry Inc., hit the 140 employee mark and secured over 100 new enterprise clients. Among them are notable brands such as Glassdoor Inc. and publicly-traded ecommerce company Wayfair LLC.

These organizations use Distil’s software to defend against two main kinds of bots: Malicious programs designed to carry out a large number of relatively simple attacks, and web scrapes built for data collection. Website traffic generated by the latter doesn’t necessarily pose a security risk but can make companies vulnerable to certain competitive threats. Retailers, for instance, often use scrapers to keep tracks of rivals’ online inventories and change their pricing whenever a discount appears on another vendor’s catalog.

Distil’s bot-fighting technology is available in the form of a CDN that is spread out over 17 locations globally and an appliance meant to be deployed behind the firewall. Since the latter offering can’t be used for content delivery, the startup has included integrations with Akamai, Amazon CloudFront and a number of other popular services. Distil says that the funding from today’s round will be used to expand its feature set even further and ramp up marketing operations in conjunction.

Image via Pixabay

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU