Web of Trust offers a free browser add-on that uses crowdsourced ratings to signal trustworthy or untrustworthy websites via a traffic-light system. The community has rated nearly 39 million websites and the add-on has been downloaded 50 million times after doubling downloads over the last year. Users rate roughly 300,000 websites each week and the add-on issues about 2.5 million warnings of untrustworthy sites daily. The crowdsourced ratings are supplemented with selected technical data services to improve accuracy. Beyond the consumer add-on, WOT licenses its website reputation data to other companies (including Facebook) and sells site-wide corporate licenses, which the company appears to rely on for revenue. The company says the new capital will be used for additional product development as it continues its growth path. Web of Trust is a browser plug-in that lets users rate websites on trustworthiness, reliability, privacy and child safety, displaying colored icons next to search results and in the toolbar. The software supports Internet Explorer and Firefox and relies on crowdsourced user ratings rather than automated crawlers, supplementing those ratings with more than a hundred third-party phishing lists. The system applies statistical algorithms and user-reputation weighting to calculate cumulative scores. WOT emphasizes privacy, stating it does not save IP addresses or browsing history, only ratings. The product was released in September 2006 for Firefox and quickly grew to 100,000 users; a new IE and Firefox version was released earlier this month, and the company says it has ranked 16 million websites. The Helsinki-based company (corporate name Against Intuition Oy) plans to monetize by selling site analysis and anonymized demographic reports to site owners.

Total raised

$2M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Nov 2012