Australian enterprise cybersecurity firm Kasada Pty Ltd. announced today it has raised $23 million in new funding to accelerate sales in the U.S. and to hire more people to capitalize on increasing demand for its services.

StepStone Group led the Series C round. Also participating in the round were Ten Eleven Ventures, Main Sequence Ventures, Reinventure, Our Innovation Fund and Turnbull & Partners.

Including the new funding, Kasada has raised $39 million to date. Previous investors include the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Our Innovation Fund and In-Q-Tel.

Founded in 2015, Kasada pitches itself as stopping bot attacks that others cannot through mitigation designed to beat cybercriminals at their own game. The company claims that its service restores trust in the internet by foiling even the stealthiest cyberthreats, from credential abuse to data scraping.

Kasada offers software that combines cryptography and user-centered design to protect websites and web apps against automated malicious attacks. The service can be onboarded in minutes and invisibly stops automated threats while inflicting financial damage to attackers, destroying their return on investment.

Under the hood, the company’s platform stops automated attacks in real-time using data analysis and machine learning from billions of bot interactions. The platform adapts to new approaches and attacks, as bot operators constantly evolve the tactics they use against websites, mobile apps and application programming interfaces.

Since the company last raised venture capital funding in June 2020, it has seen growth in revenue of 230%, though it didn’t reveal absolute numbers. The increase has been achieved, Kasada said, by expanding its go-to-market capabilities, defense platform and operations to capitalize on the demand for its cybersecurity solution within the U.S. It now protects more than $20 billion in e-commerce transactions annually and stops more than 5 billion monthly requests left undetected by legacy systems.

In the last 18 months, Kasada said, has grown its customer base by 80%, including new Fortune 50, S&P/ASX 50 and Russell 1000 customers. Notable customers include the Sydney Opera House, LegalShield, Hyatt Hotel Corp., Sportsbet Pty. Ltd., Empire Southwest Inc. and True Alliance Pty. Ltd.

“Businesses are tired of bot mitigation solutions that are difficult to operate, time-consuming to maintain, and cannot keep up with the latest tools bot operators use,” Sam Crowther, founder and chief executive officer of Kasada, said in a statement. “We’ve set out to make application security much easier to implement and use while also improving its effectiveness.”

Image: Kasada