Founded by CSE alums Brandon Ballinger and Jason Tan, Sift Science has been bubbling along for many months and revealed itself to the public on March 19th. The company also announced $4 million in Series A Funding.
Sift Science started as part of the Y Combinator’s 2011 summer batch. It fights fraud with large-scale machine learning that automatically discovers new fraud patterns. The service is primarily targeting online marketplaces, payment networks, and e-commerce sites, where fraud is most prevalent. Businesses can integrate Sift Science’s technology by copying and pasting a small snippet of JavaScript code to their sites. The startup has over 1 million different fraud patterns in its database, but continually adds to that as its algorithm crunches more data and learns more patterns. Sites like Airbnb, Uber, and Listia already rely on Sift Science.
Learn more about Sift Science here. Coverage of Sift Science’s announcement: Wired, AllThingsD, Gigaom, TechCrunch, Venture Beat, The Next Web. And a particularly good one in The Wall Street Journal: “Sift Science Funded to ‘Fight Evil on the Internet’“