Bot detection and mitigation platform startup Netacea Ltd. today announced that it has received £9m ($12m) in new funding to expand its presence in the U.K. and the U.S.

Investors in this Series A round included Mercia Asset Management and several individual investors.

Founded in 2018, Netacea detects and mitigates against bot attacks that target mobile, website and application programming interface applications. The company’s technology uses threat intelligence and machine learning to identify and mitigate threats in near real-time.

Offering an agentless approach that does not require code to be inserted on customers’ web pages, Netacea claims that its approach allows it to stay hidden from attackers while also protecting mobile apps and APIs.

Pitching itself as offering the “next generation of bot detection,” the company notes that an estimated 10% to 40% of all web traffic is malicious bots. These bot attacks are becoming more sophisticated and can appear to be human, bypassing many defenses that have been put in place to identify them. In using new detection techniques, Netacea claims that it can detect and categorize more malicious activity with lower false positives than other techniques, constantly preventing malicious attacks.

Bot management is said to be essential to protecting an organization and customers against business logic exploits carried out using sophisticated automated bot attacks, such as credential stuffing, carding and scalping. Netacea currently protects billions of transactions per week at some of the largest brands across retail, banking, travel and gaming.

While founded and based in the U.K., Netacea is rapidly growing in the U.S., having landed several big-name customers, including Shutterstock Inc. Other notable customers include Sony Corp., Malwarebytes Inc., Clear Score Technology Ltd., William Hill Ltd., All Saints Retail Ltd. and Pets at Home Group PLC.

“A simplistic rules-based approach to bot management won’t cut it anymore,” Alex Eckelberry, a former non-executive director at KnowBe4 Inc. and one of the investors in Netacea, said in a statement. “Security suites need to be supported by dedicated bot management solutions that can respond to new threats and take advantage of new threat intelligence. Netacea’s agentless approach is the right one.”

Image: Netacea