Funding

Goldman Sachs Invests in WhiteOps

NEW YORK – White Ops, a provider of bot mitigation and fraud protection, says it has received an undisclosed investment from Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division and ClearSky Security to support its next phase of growth.

With this investment, a member of the Goldman Sachs team will join representatives from previous investors Paladin Capital Group and Grotech Ventures on the White Ops board of directors.

The investment will enable White Ops to further accelerate its growth and expansion on a global basis, support product development, and expand into new vertical markets. The Company’s core mission is to protect enterprises from sophisticated bot attacks and fraud across the domains of cybersecurity, digital advertising, and marketing, serving some of the largest enterprises and internet platforms. Today, White Ops verifies the humanity of more than 5 trillion interactions per week and growing, providing an incredibly broad and deep platform to stop nefarious activity across the internet. As the shift in consumer and enterprise engagement toward digital channels continues to accelerate, it is a critical time to be proactive in protecting against fraud and sophisticated bot attacks.

“Goldman Sachs and ClearSky are ideal partners to support our growth across multiple markets, use cases and geographies,” said Tamer Hassan, CEO and co-founder of White Ops. “Their investment in the Company and support of our mission to disrupt the economics of cybercrime puts us in an incredibly strong position to extend our leadership and execute on our vision for the collective protection against fraud and abuse.”

“White Ops is a gold standard in bot detection and mitigation and we’re delighted to be able to partner with them, especially at a time when levels of cybercrime are increasing significantly, there is an accelerated shift to digital, and the Company has seen a meaningful increase in the demand for their services,” said Anthony Arnold, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs.  “We look forward to working with the management team to continue their track record of innovation in this large and fast-growing market.”

“White Ops’ technology platform and bot detection framework are highly differentiated in its industry, helping detect and prevent the most sophisticated forms of digital fraud,” said Matthew Popper, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs.  “We look forward to helping maximize White Ops’ growth potential, including expanding into new industry verticals and serving new use cases.”

“As bot-based fraud becomes increasingly prevalent across the internet, enterprises and internet platforms require sophisticated threat protection now more than ever,” said Jay Leek, Managing Partner of ClearSky.  “We look forward to partnering with management to continue to build on White Ops’ leadership position in the industry.”

Bad actors with millions of sophisticated bots at their disposal cause fraud at the rate of tens of billions of dollars a year against companies across the globe. These sophisticated bots live on consumer and enterprise devices, sharing browsing history and habits with real humans, which makes them especially difficult to detect. White Ops’ multilayered detection methodology, advanced algorithms, Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team, and massive scale can detect and prevent these bot populations at every level of sophistication. These capabilities enabled White Ops to play a leading role in taking down 3ve, the largest ad fraud botnet to date, through collective protection and bringing together the largest private sector collaboration in history, including the FBI, Google, Facebook and many others in the industry. White Ops also recently uncovered ICEBUCKET, the largest and widest Connected TV (CTV) related fraud operation.

White Ops Bot Mitigation Platform solves top cybersecurity use cases through its three product offerings:

  • Application Integrity – Protects enterprises from fraud and abuse of applications including account takeover attacks, automated account creation, and web scraping, enabling low friction user experiences and saving dollars lost due to fraud
  • Advertising Integrity – Protects from fraud and abuse in online media and advertising, across desktop, mobile, and CTV environments, enabling more effective advertising spend
  • Marketing Integrity – Protects from fraud and abuse in performance marketing, user acquisition, and lead generation, driving higher conversion rates, reducing wasted marketing and sales spend, and ensuring the accuracy and integrity of analytics and the customer acquisition funnel