Startup Cheq AI Technologies Ltd., which helps companies block malicious online traffic, today announced that it has raised $150 million in new funding. 

The Series C funding round was led by Tiger Global. Battery Ventures, Hanaco, Phoenix Insurance and Key1 Capital participated as well. Cheq is now reportedly valued at about $1 billion.  

Tel Aviv-based Cheq provides what it describes as a go-to-market cybersecurity platform. The platform, which is delivered as a cloud service, enables companies to filter bot traffic and other malicious network requests targeting their websites. Cheq can also help block fraudulent activity targeting a company’s online marketing operations. 

A sizable portion of online traffic is generated by bots. Some bots are used to carry out hacking attempts, while others perform tasks such as scraping product information from an e-commerce company’s website. Such traffic creates a number of challenges for organizations.

Bot traffic can cause accuracy issues in a company’s data analytics initiatives. Many firms analyze their website traffic to find business insights, such as what product listings are clicked most often by shoppers, and operational decisions are frequently made based on this data. If a company makes decisions based on website traffic data, and some of the traffic is malicious, inefficiencies can emerge. 

Cheq says its platform can automatically filter bot traffic sent to a company’s website. The platform blocks bots based on rules that every organization can customize according to its operational requirements. 

According to Cheq, its platform also prevents attempts to submit bot-generated data through website forms. Forms are often connected to an organization’s internal applications. A retailer, for example, may send data from the product feedback page on its e-commerce website to its customer relationship management system. Cheq says its platform prevents malicious data from finding its way to a company’s internal applications. 

“We’re putting cybersecurity in the hands of go-to-market leaders, to secure their operations, marketing, sales, data and analytics from fake users, bots and other malicious actors, who make up over 40% of the internet’s traffic,” said Cheq founder and Chief Executive Officer Guy Tytunovich. “We’re providing GTM organizations the highest level of protection a CISO could require, without hurting the needs of the CMO, CRO and other GTM leaders.”

In addition to filtering malicious website traffic, Cheq helps companies tackle fraudulent activity targeting their online ads. Online ads are priced based on the number of users who interact with them. In some cases, bots may interact with online ads, leading to unnecessary marketing expenses for companies. Cheq can detect such events to help optimize enterprise marketing initiatives.

Besides reducing marketing costs, preventing bots from interacting with an ad campaign can also enable companies to engage customers more effectively. Ad targeting algorithms sometimes incorporate data from bot interactions into the calculations they use to optimize ad delivery. Removing bot-generated data enables the algorithms to determine more accurately the best way of engaging users. 

According to Cheq, its platform is used by more than 12,000 customers across north of 50,000 websites. To continue growing its installed base, Cheq will use a part of its new $150 million funding round to expand its sales and marketing teams. The startup will also accelerate research and development activities.

Cheq’s funding round comes about a week after Netacea Ltd., another startup that helps companies block bot traffic, raised a $12 million funding round of its own. U.K.-based Netacea uses artificial intelligence to detect bots targeting a company’s website, mobile apps and the application programming interfaces of its systems.  

Image: Cheq