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Case Study

Crunchbase Blocks Bots and Optimizes Customer Experience

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Company

Crunchbase is the leading platform for professionals to discover innovative companies, connect with the people behind them, and pursue new opportunities. Over 50 million professionals—including entrepreneurs, investors, market researchers, and salespeople—trust Crunchbase to inform their business decisions. 

- Head of Engineering, Crunchbase

“I would absolutely recommend HUMAN to any team that’s trying to battle bot traffic. The solution is invaluable in stopping the bots that can scrape or compromise our data. It minimizes false positives that can frustrate site users and waste our staff’s time and resources.”

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Challenge

Crunchbase makes over a billion calls to our API each year. Given the persistent threats to its data and site, Crunchbase deployed a bot defense product to guard against account takeover attacks and website scraping. However, the team soon realized that the product’s false-positive rates were far too high.
 
Legitimate users were flagged as malicious and forced to solve CAPTCHAs or blocked entirely, which frustrated users and reflected poorly on the company. The internal team spent significant time handling customer complaints, managing and remediating tickets, and helping resolve access issues. The company needed a new bot management solution that would block malicious bots without returning false positives. 

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Solution

Crunchbase turned to HUMAN Application Protection, which offered a range of features that aligned with the team’s requirements:

  • Low False Positives: Application Protection uses machine-learning, behavioral analysis, and predictive methods to identify and block bots with unparalleled accuracy, maintaining low false positives.
  • Deployment Flexibility: The solution offered a deployment option that integrated with their existing gateway.
  • Flexible Control: This implementation approach gave Crunchbase the control to selectively enable traffic to bypass bot blocking based on established parameters as needed.
  • Improved Customer Experience: Application Protection uses Human Challenge, a user-friendly CAPTCHA alternative. The solution ensures low latency, preserving website performance.

RESULTS

By implementing Application Protection, Crunchbase realized the following benefits:

  • Enhanced Reliability: Authorized users can now consistently access the critical resources they need when they need them. Further, customers have more confidence in the data accessed, knowing that bots are blocked from making any unauthorized modifications to data.
  • Improved User Experience: Now, users can more consistently enjoy optimal performance because bots aren’t consuming resources. For example, security team staff members noticed that a new bot started targeting the site with a huge wave of traffic, which ultimately could have placed a significant drain on resources and diminished the customer experience. In real-time, Application Protection learned the pattern of the new bots and blocked them immediately.
  • Improved Staff and Operational Efficiency: Internal support teams have been able to avoid all the time and effort associated with the prior tool’s false positives. The team dramatically cut the time they spend on following up with customers to fix erroneous access issues, as well as managing the tickets and remediation efforts associated with these issues.

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