Smyte is an online security platform that leverages machine learning and human touch to identify potentially malicious activity using signals like commonly used account profile pictures and trigrams. Founded in 2014 by Pete Hunt, Julian Tempelsman and Josh Yudaken, the company is a Y Combinator Winter 2015 graduate. Smyte initially targeted peer-to-peer marketplaces and social apps and plans to expand into SaaS providers, financial services companies and healthcare organizations. Customers include GoFundMe, Meetup, Quora and TaskRabbit. Financially, Smyte raised $4M in a Series A led by Avalon Ventures and has now raised $6.25M in total. Avalon Ventures partner Rich Levandov joined Smyte’s board in conjunction with the funding. Smyte offers a plug-and-play trust-and-safety solution for social networks and two-sided marketplaces, allowing developers to add a line of code to integrate its protections. The platform ingests a data feed and uses an automated labeling system that flags potentially malicious activity based on signals and relationships, then routes cases for manual review. Smyte emphasizes minimizing false positives and letting legitimate users through even when their behavior appears risky to automated systems. The company launched out of beta to address fraud, spam, and harassment problems that larger firms staff with dedicated teams. Smyte says it is already processing millions of data points per day and is working with several top crowdfunding platforms. The company has raised seed funding of $2.25 million from a group of investors including Harrison Metal, Baseline Ventures, Founder Collective, Upside Partnership and Y Combinator.

Total raised

$6M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Mar 2017