Software-as-a-service bot protection startup DataDome SAS today announced that it has raised $42 million in new funding to support its mission to rid the web of bot-driven cyberattacks and fraud.

Founded in 2014, DataDome is a bot protection startup that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect and block advanced bot attacks in real time. The company’s technology compares every request to a website with an in-memory pattern database and decides in less than two milliseconds whether access to a page should be granted.

DataDome argues that malicious bots continue to evolve and circumvent security measures. The rise of human-bot combinations and AI-powered bots has facilitated the consistent bypass of usual point-in-time, static barriers like web application firewalls, traditional CAPTCHAs and user validation databases.

“Bots have become a common path to fraud. In 2022 alone, DataDome stopped, in real-time, over 250 billion online fraud attempts,” Benjamin Fabre, co-founder and chief executive of DataDome, explains. “Because of how our product is built and deployed, we have a unique lens into attack vectors and can see across silos to stop attacks in their tracks.”

The new funding will be used to further DataDome’s commercial rollout and research and development efforts, to give DataDome, in Fabre’s words, an “award-winning competitive edge” and to stay well ahead of bot developers and fraudsters.

DataDome is designed to serve DevSecOps and development, security and operations personnel with a complete software-as-a-service platform that offers enterprise-level professional services and dedicated bot security operations centers. The company says its service can be easily integrated with any web infrastructure and can be installed and running in under an hour.

The company offers support for integration with Amazon Web Services Inc., Fastly Inc., Cloudflare Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc.’s Commerce Cloud, among others.

DataDome counts among its customers Rakuten Inc., Reddit Inc., AngelList LLC, Axel Springer SE, the New York Times Co., McDonald’s Corp. and Foot Locker Retail Inc.

The Series C round was led by InfraVia Growth Management SAS, with participation from existing investors Elephant Venture Capital GmbH, ISAI Gestion SAS and others. Including the new round, DataDome has raised $81.2 million, according to data from Crunchbase.

Photo: DataDome/Twitter