Australian digital security and fraud prevention startup Darwinium Pty. Ltd. today announced that it has raised $18 million in new funding to scale up its edge-based solution across global geographies, where it said it’s gaining traction across industries such as fintech, e-commerce, financial services, gaming and gambling.

Founded in 2021, Darwinium offers a decision technology platform that matches security, fraud and customer experience. The platform uses integrated machine learning, orchestration and analytics to safeguard mobile apps, websites and application programming interfaces against automated attacks by protecting customer privacy and minimizing risk exposure with anonymization, masking and secure computing techniques.

The company’s platform seeks to address increasing levels of online fraud that have become harder and more complex to detect. Added to the mix is that online fraud is now being turbocharged by artificial intelligence. Darwinium argues that while businesses have responded with multi-point solutions deployed across the customer journey, these have created friction for good users and information silos that favor the attacker.

The platform these challenges in two ways. It moves fraud detection processes to the customer’s network perimeter to provide businesses a holistic view of their customers’ online experience and journey across every digital touchpoint, better separating trusted and risky behavior. And it uses a software-as-a-service approach to data protection that weaves strong, strategic data security into a unique, edge-based approach.

By shifting detection processes to the edge, Darwinium claims, it’s disrupting a market dominated by API-based products that risk-assess “moments in time” – an approach claimed to lack the agility and context required to respond to evolving fraud.

Darwiniuim leverages content delivery networks such as Cloudflare Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc.’s CloudFront to integrate at the network perimeter, providing a continuous view of user behavior. The model puts full control of fraud and risk mitigation into the hands of businesses to act on intelligence in real time, dynamically tailoring customer journeys according to trust and risk.

The platform also has integrations with outside services that further enrich risk decisions with additional intelligence, allowing customers to simplify their cyber-fraud strategy by consolidating multiple solutions.

“AI capabilities have given fraudsters the upper hand of speed, scale and greater efficiency,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Alisdair Faulkner. “This is why we designed Darwinium to deliver the visibility and coverage of a security tool, the context and insight of fraud solutions, with the agility of AI.”

U.S. Venture Partners LLC led the Series A round, with Blackbird Ventures Pty. Ltd., Airtree Ventures Pty. Ltd. and Accomplice LLC also participating. Including the new funding, Darwinium has raised $26 million to date.

Image: Darwinium