Investment will further accelerate White Ops' growth and expansion in new markets
NEW YORK, May 6, 2020 - White Ops ("White Ops" or the "Company"), the global leader in bot mitigation and fraud protection, today announced the completion of an investment by Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division and ClearSky Security to support the Company in its next phase of growth. With this investment, a member of the Goldman Sachs team will join representatives from previous investors Paladin Capital Group and Grotech Ventures on the White Ops board of directors. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
The investment will enable White Ops to further accelerate its growth and expansion on a global basis, support product development, and expand into new vertical markets. The Company's core mission is to protect enterprises from sophisticated bot attacks and fraud across the domains of cybersecurity, digital advertising, and marketing, serving some of the largest enterprises and internet platforms. Today, White Ops verifies the humanity of more than 5 trillion interactions per week and growing, providing an incredibly broad and deep platform to stop nefarious activity across the internet. As the shift in consumer and enterprise engagement toward digital channels continues to accelerate, it is a critical time to be proactive in protecting against fraud and sophisticated bot attacks.
“Goldman Sachs and ClearSky are ideal partners to support our growth across multiple markets, use cases and geographies,” said Tamer Hassan, CEO and co-founder of White Ops. “Their investment in the Company and support of our mission to disrupt the economics of cybercrime puts us in an incredibly strong position to extend our leadership and execute on our vision for the collective protection against fraud and abuse.”
"White Ops is a gold standard in bot detection and mitigation and we’re delighted to be able to partner with them, especially at a time when levels of cybercrime are increasing significantly, there is an accelerated shift to digital, and the Company has seen a meaningful increase in the demand for their services," said Anthony Arnold, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs. "We look forward to working with the management team to continue their track record of innovation in this large and fast-growing market."
"White Ops' technology platform and bot detection framework are highly differentiated in its industry, helping detect and prevent the most sophisticated forms of digital fraud," said Matthew Popper, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs. "We look forward to helping maximize White Ops’ growth potential, including expanding into new industry verticals and serving new use cases."
"As bot-based fraud becomes increasingly prevalent across the internet, enterprises and internet platforms require sophisticated threat protection now more than ever," said Jay Leek, Managing Partner of ClearSky. "We look forward to partnering with management to continue to build on White Ops’ leadership position in the industry."
Bad actors with millions of sophisticated bots at their disposal cause fraud at the rate of tens of billions of dollars a year against companies across the globe. These sophisticated bots live on consumer and enterprise devices, sharing browsing history and habits with real humans, which makes them especially difficult to detect. White Ops’ multilayered detection methodology, advanced algorithms, Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team, and massive scale can detect and prevent these bot populations at every level of sophistication. These capabilities enabled White Ops to play a leading role in taking down 3ve, the largest ad fraud botnet to date, through collective protection and bringing together the largest private sector collaboration in history, including the FBI, Google, Facebook and many others in the industry. White Ops also recently uncovered ICEBUCKET, the largest and widest Connected TV (CTV) related fraud operation.
White Ops Bot Mitigation Platform solves top cybersecurity use cases through its three product offerings:
- Application Integrity - Protects enterprises from fraud and abuse of applications including account takeover attacks, automated account creation, and web scraping, enabling low friction user experiences and saving dollars lost due to fraud
- Advertising Integrity - Protects from fraud and abuse in online media and advertising, across desktop, mobile, and CTV environments, enabling more effective advertising spend
- Marketing Integrity - Protects from fraud and abuse in performance marketing, user acquisition, and lead generation, driving higher conversion rates, reducing wasted marketing and sales spend, and ensuring the accuracy and integrity of analytics and the customer acquisition funnel
To learn more about White Ops perspective on how this investment further advances their mission, read this blog post from CEO and co-founder, Tamer Hassan: https://www.whiteops.com/blog/why-white-ops
About White Ops
White Ops is the global leader in bot mitigation and fraud protection. We protect more than 200 enterprises—including the largest internet platforms—from sophisticated bots attacks across the domains of cyber security, digital advertising and marketing by verifying the humanity of more than 5 trillion online interactions every week. The most sophisticated bots look and act like humans when they click on ads, visit websites, fill out forms, take over accounts, and commit payment fraud. We stop them. To learn more, visit www.whiteops.com.
About Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division
Founded in 1869, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is a leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm. Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division (MBD) is the primary center for the firm’s long-term principal investing activity. MBD is one of the leading private capital investors in the world with investments across private equity, infrastructure, private debt, growth equity and real estate.
About ClearSky
ClearSky is a venture capital/growth equity firm that has been operating since 2012 with offices in Florida, New York, Boston and San Francisco. ClearSky is currently investing through two funds: ClearSky Power & Technology and ClearSky Security. ClearSky Power & Technology invests in innovative companies providing technology and services to enterprise customers, with a special focus on the power sector. ClearSky Security invests in companies that offer transformative security solutions, with a special focus on cybersecurity, industrial security and critical infrastructure security.
