Our Investment in Kasada
Today we are pleased to announce our Series B investment in Kasada, a web traffic integrity solution. Unlike legacy approaches, CDN providers, and WAF players who provide incomplete and inefficient bot mitigation tools, Kasada offers a dedicated cloud platform committed to mitigating malicious automation with the most accurate filtering of all forms of undesired web traffic. We believe this technology is a critical part of creating a safer Internet for people and businesses worldwide.
Business and security leaders are learning more and more about how destructive malicious automation can truly be. As much as 75% of a leading site’s traffic can consist of bots, including various forms of competitive site-scraping for IP, content, and data. Executives need a specialized, best-in-breed solution that protects their most fundamental assets, including their customers, their brand, and their intellectual property, from malicious bot traffic.
Kasada’s dedicated reverse-proxy high availability cloud platform, built on a patented, dynamic cryptographic method developed by its innovative founder Sam Crowther (who founded Kasada after working for the cybersecurity team at the Australian Signals Directorate “ASD”), addresses several use cases that help companies protect business value. These include protection from not only highly technical DDoS attacks and account takeover attacks, but also content scraping attacks and automated attacks on APIs, which can open the door to an enterprise’s most valuable digital assets. We believe that Kasada’s platform approach to defending web, mobile, and APIs from malicious automation is unique and differentiating in the marketplace.
Kasada’s customers can use “good” automation to ward off the evils of “bad” automation, which continues to be creatively used to exploit and degrade digital business resources.
In addition to the usual security value, our customer diligence calls highlighted how much value Kasada’s customers are receiving via reduced cloud infrastructure costs and increased protection of proprietary information. A great example is the ability to protect the real-time pricing information that many competitors and other unwanted automated aggregators are crawling for and scraping from public-facing digital assets. Without the impact of “bad” automation, more businesses and consumers can benefit more quickly and confidently from digital transformation efforts.
Notably, this investment was closed during the onset of the COVID-19 lockdowns and resultant market turmoil. Completing a deal during this time was a strenuous exercise for all, but one in which strong communication was fostered between the international Kasada team and the distributed team at Ten Eleven. We believe that working through this challenging and unusual time together and closing on terms as originally forged, despite market uncertainty, has established the groundwork for a meaningful partnership going forward. By doing so, we built trust and confidence with the existing investors and management team that will be of great value in the long-run, as we all work together to bring Kasada to the world security stage.
This investment also represents our first investment in Australia, the sixth country in which Ten Eleven Ventures has invested, furthering our commitment to investing in global, best-in-class technologies. The Australian ecosystem for technology innovation and start-ups is extremely exciting to Ten Eleven Ventures. The U.S. is strongly aligned with Australia from both a business and a geopolitical perspective. We view Kasada as the first of several investments in the area and look forward to introducing and expanding our partners and advisors to this ecosystem. Similarly, we are pleased to be working on this deal with our new co-investors, Main Sequence Ventures and Westpac’s venture capital arm, Reinventure, as well as old friends and partners In-Q-Tel. Together we will help Kasada strengthen its brand in the U.S. and worldwide, as the company brings its proven offerings to a new set of geographies, and helps ensure a new level of trust and integrity to the Internet.
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