The Venture Codex

Participated · Series A · Jul 2017

Arkose Labs provides an online fraud and abuse prevention technology platform that determines true user intent and remediates attacks in real time. The platform combines risk assessments with interactive authentication challenges to undermine the ROI of attacks, providing long-term protection while improving legitimate customer throughput. The company raised $70M in a Series C, bringing total funding to date to $114M. Arkose intends to use the funds for platform development, new hires and global expansion. Led by founder and CEO Kevin Gosschalk, the company is based in San Francisco with offices in Brisbane and London. Its customers include global brands such as Electronic Arts, Dropbox, Microsoft, PayPal, and Sony Interactive Entertainment. Arkose Labs provides online fraud and abuse prevention technology via a patented platform that combines Arkose Detect, a risk engine, with Arkose Enforce, which delivers targeted step-up challenges. The platform is designed to remediate bot- and human-driven attacks while minimizing friction for legitimate users, addressing issues such as account takeover, virtual-economy abuse, bot-driven in-game cheating, bonus abuse and spam. Arkose emphasizes user-centric authentication and gamified challenges to preserve user experience while wearing down fraudsters. Major gaming customers named include Microsoft, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Roblox, EA and Minecraft, and the company says it has scaled its approach across multiple industries. The article notes online gaming traffic rose 30% in Q2 2020, increasing demand for fraud prevention, and Arkose was named a 2020 Gartner Cool Vendor for Identity Access Management and Fraud Detection. Arkose Labs is based in San Francisco with offices in Brisbane, Australia; in 2020 it completed a $22M Series B led by M12 and has since received an investment from Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. Arkose Labs offers an online fraud and abuse prevention technology platform that protects consumer actions from a range of abuses, including account takeover, fake account abuse, scraping, spam and gift card abuse. The platform serves many Fortune 50 companies across financial services, ecommerce, media, gaming and emerging technology sectors. Named customers include Microsoft, GitHub, Electronic Arts, Singapore Airlines, Roblox and Twilio. The company is led by founder and CEO Kevin Gosschalk and is based in San Francisco, with additional offices in Brisbane, Australia. Arkose Labs raised an additional $22M in Series B funding. The company intends to use the proceeds for platform development, new hires and global expansion. Arkose Labs provides online fraud-prevention technology that combines global telemetry, user behavioral risk assessment and patent‑pending enforcement challenges to stop automated attacks. Its enforcement challenge gives immediate feedback on telemetry, enabling attacker identification and classification. Following a strategic investment from PayPal, Arkose plans to expand its product roadmap to add additional fraud-prevention and digital identity capabilities. The company says it prevented over $100 million of fraudulent activity within its customer base in the past 12 months and observes a 10-to-1 ratio of automated fraudulent login attempts to legitimate logins. Arkose offers a 100 percent service level agreement with a money‑back guarantee if the technology fails to stop an automated attack. Its technology is being adopted across sectors including online communities and marketplaces, travel, banking, social media, ticketing and gaming; the company is based in San Francisco with offices in Brisbane, Australia. Arkose Labs offers online fraud prevention technology that combines global telemetry, user behavioral risk assessment and patent-pending enforcement challenges to stop automated abuse. The company says its approach stops fraud before it occurs without adding friction to legitimate users and backs that claim with a 100 percent service level agreement and money-back guarantee. Its solution has seen adoption across sectors including online marketplaces, travel, banking, social media, ticketing and online gaming, and customers include Electronic Arts. Arkose Labs plans to use the new funding to expand its product roadmap, accelerate hiring, and build out enterprise go-to-market teams. The company was previously known as FunCaptcha and is based in San Francisco, with offices in Brisbane, Australia.