The Venture Codex

Participated · Seed · Jan 2013

Distil provides a Content Protection Network (CPN) and a cloud-based, intelligent gatekeeper for website content. Its service is designed to mitigate duplicate content, improve SEO power and accelerate the end-user experience while reducing server load and infrastructure demand. The company is based in Arlington, VA and is co-founded by CEO Rami Essaid, CTO Engin Akyol and Chief Scientist Andrew Stein. Distil raised an additional $200K via AngelList's Invest platform, adding to a $1.8M seed round from January 2013. The firm is currently hiring, indicating ongoing product development and growth plans. Distil offers a cloud-based enterprise service that protects website content by distinguishing search engines and human visitors from malicious bots and accelerating site performance through its global Content Protection Network (CPN). The company targets online verticals including social media, e-commerce, travel, digital publishing and directories. Distil completed the inaugural TechStars Cloud class in early 2012. It is led by co-founder and CEO Rami Essaid. The product is positioned as a premium, enterprise-grade solution for bot protection and content security. The article does not disclose revenue or user metrics. Distil is a Falls Church, Va.-based software-as-a-service web security company led by founder and CEO Rami Essaid. Its core product, the Content Protection Network (CPN), routes web traffic through algorithms that distinguish legitimate search engines and user traffic from malicious traffic and attacks. The network evaluates user validity in real time to make decisions about access and distribution. Distil’s solution is designed to help customers preserve SEO rankings, protect proprietary digital content, and improve advertising revenue. The company provides these protections to content creators and publishers via its SaaS offering. In addition to product details, the company disclosed a $100K investment from the Center for Innovative Technology’s CIT GAP Funds.

Participated · Seed · Jan 2013

Distil Networks provides bot-detection and mitigation services that discover and eradicate malicious web bots. The company's core product focuses on eliminating bot traffic to strengthen customers' security posture. Management reports the company has over 400 customers and has been growing quickly, with roughly 2.5x revenue growth per year. Distil began the year with about 100 employees, had 150 at the time of the article, and is looking to double headcount by year-end. Leadership has set aside funds for a strategic acquisition and aims to reach profitability by the end of next year. The company is targeting financial institutions and sees its relationship with Silicon Valley Bank as a channel into banks. Distil Networks offers a bot-detection and mitigation platform that inspects incoming web traffic to determine whether visitors are human or automated by analyzing navigation paths, movement intervals, and input activity. The product can challenge uncertain visitors with CAPTCHAs, chat windows, or email tests, throttle or block bots, feed false data, and reset compromised credentials while notifying affected users. The company serves several dozen large enterprise clients and thousands of SMBs, including a major online ticket seller. Founded in 2011 by Rami Essaid and two co-founders, Distil has about 60 employees with offices in Arlington, VA and San Francisco and plans to hire another 100 over the next year. The team intends to expand the platform with additional products, with a new product due later this year. Distil Networks offers a platform that detects and mitigates malicious bots to prevent web scraping, account hijacking, form spam, click fraud and related attacks. The company reports it has blocked over 30 billion bad bots to date. Founded in 2011 and led by CEO Rami Essaid, Distil is based in Arlington, Virginia. Distil plans to use newly secured capital to expand to the West Coast and pursue additional growth initiatives. The company is backed by investors including Foundry Group, Techstars’ Bullet Time Ventures, ff Venture Capital, IDEA Fund Partners and Militello Capital. Its core product is focused on automated threat blocking for both personal and enterprise web properties. Distil Networks provides bot-detection and mitigation solutions, addressing use cases such as click fraud and price scraping. The company is positioning itself as a broader, more holistic security platform rather than addressing individual bot problems. Distil says it works with customers ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies and has blocked 9 billion "bad bots." Revenue is growing 20 percent month over month. The team emphasizes making the product stickier by bringing multiple stakeholders to the table during sales. Management plans continued investment in product, marketing and sales — including improving the promotional robots they use at events. Distil.it is a cloud-based platform that helps businesses identify and block web scraping and other malicious web-born fraud. The company calls itself a Content Protection Network (CPN) that scans website traffic and makes real-time decisions to distinguish customers from bots while accelerating content through 15 global nodes to reduce server load and improve site speed. Distil.it uses sophisticated code injections and a layer of machine learning rather than simple rate limiting to verify connection identity and detect automated agents on a site-to-site basis. When it captures a malicious bot it builds a signature and aggregates those signatures across customers, crowdsourcing bot DNA to protect all clients. The company has experienced 35% month-over-month revenue growth over the last four months. With the new capital it plans to expand its cloud network footprint by spinning up four new data centers over the next quarter and to add more robust analytics to its user portals so customers can better identify attackers and monetize traffic.