Shape Security closes funding round which sees it join the unicorn club

Bot and online fraud mitigation platform Shape Security has raised $51m in a new growth funding round, which brings its valuation to $1bn.

C5 Capital led the round, with participation also coming from previous Shape Security backers Kleiner Perkins, HPE Growth, Norwest Ventures Partners, Focus Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures, Top Tier Capital Partners, and EPIC Ventures.

With this round, the company has raised $183m in equity. The company’s former round was a $26m investment round last year which was led by Norwest Venture Partners.

Having closed the round, the company is looking to accelerate its expansion across Europe and the Middle East, as well as fostering growth in North America.

California-based Shape Security helps businesses protect themselves from all types of fraud against their applications. Its services detect and blocks up to two billion fraudulent or unwanted transactions each day, keeping 200 million legitimate logins safe.

Its AI platform detects and shuts down automated attacks in real-time. Shape’s platform can distinguish real users from fraudsters even when criminals use manual methods.

Some of the attacks it can protect a business from include, fake accounts, credential stuffing, credit application fraud, gift card cracking, scraping, application ddos, and aggregator threat surface.

C5 Capital managing partner André Pienaar said, “Shape’s growth and product innovation is unlike anything we’ve seen in enterprise security. Shape already protects Internet users at scale by detecting and blocking up to 2 billion fraudulent transactions daily. This new injection of capital will further the company’s global market penetration.”