The Venture Codex

Participated · Seed · Jun 2011

Impermium provides a subscription-based service that protects social web transactions against spam, fraud and abuse across social networks, media companies and consumer websites. The company runs pilot projects with major social and media platforms and is currently providing anti-spam and fraud/abuse support to DISQUS, which serves 600 million monthly users and is deployed on sites including CNN, The Atlantic, Fox News and Time Magazine. Impermium was founded in 2010 by CEO Mark Risher, CTO Vish Ramarao and Naveen Jamal and is based in Palo Alto, CA. The company plans to use new capital to fuel build-out of its service and to expand engineering, data analytics, sales and marketing teams. Andy Miller of Highland Capital Partners will join Impermium’s board in conjunction with the funding. Impermium offers a service that detects and removes fraudulent and spammy user-generated content across partner sites. The company uses a machine-learning approach that analyzes single-site traffic and cross-site traffic to identify patterns, anomalies and suspicious transaction groups. Impermium has been testing the service with about ten websites that together reach more than 50 million unique users, and the team reports having analyzed 50 million pieces of content. Early beta testers include Livefyre and Posterous. The founding team includes CEO Mark Risher (formerly Yahoo’s “Spam Czar”) and colleagues Vish Ramarao and Naveen Jamal from Yahoo. Impermium has begun commercial rollout discussions and interest from publishers and platforms dealing with growing spam problems.