(From left) Trustev's founding team Chris Kennedy, Pat Phelan and John Peavoy
Just months after raising one of the largest seed funding rounds – US$3m – in Europe, Cork-headquartered fraud prevention start-up Trustev has raised a further US$500,000 in investment from Notion Capital.
Trustev uses a proprietary algorithmic engine to analyse and compare multiple dynamic data sources to independently verify a user’s identity on e-commerce sites – a digital fingerprint, so to speak.
In October, Trustev closed a US$3m seed round from investors in the US and Europe, including Greycroft Partners, Mangrove Capital Partners, ACT Ventures and others.
The funding will be used to accelerate the development of Trustev’s world-leading anti-fraud and identity verification technology for e-commerce merchants.
After launching at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York last May, Trustev was named 2013’s top technology start-up in Europe by the European Commission. Trustev has grown more than three-fold since launch and will open an office in New York City in the first quarter of 2014.
“With the support of all of our forward-thinking investors we can focus on eliminating fraud for Trustev’s clients so they can focus on serving their customers,” said Pat Phelan, Trustev’s co-founder and CEO.
“The Notion Capital team founded MessageLabs, one of the largest ever exits in the European IT security market, and the firm was recently named Equity Gap Fund of the Year in the Investor Allstars awards. Their backing is a huge validation of our technology.”
According to research by eMarketer, global e-commerce sales are expected to reach nearly US$1.3trn in 2013. Trustev’s identity verification and fraud elimination solution drastically reduces the losses e-commerce merchants currently suffer from online fraud, also allowing them to sell with confidence in countries previously deemed too high risk.
“As the size of the global e-commerce market continues to grow in the trillions, we believe Trustev’s innovative solution for online merchants will be vital to eliminating fraud and opening up more countries for cross-border e-commerce sales,” said Jos White, partner at Notion Capital.
