Startup DataVisor Nabs $14.5 Million to Fund Spark-based Security

DataVisor, a startup company that is building big things around Apache Spark, has announced that it has secured $14.5 million in Series A funding, led by GSR and NEA, to purportedly help protect consumer-facing websites and mobile apps from cyber criminals. The young company's founders spent years working on computer security at Microsoft Research, and are now focused on big data.

The company's software features a unique security analytics engine that operates within a Spark big data platform that can analyze billions of events per hour and automatically discover unknown malicious campaigns early, without the use of labels or training data. 

Founded in December 2013, DataVisor is already working with its technology, serving a few of the largest Internet properties in the world, including Yelp and Momo, which, with over 180 million users, is one of top social platforms in China.

"Yelp is committed to protecting the integrity of our content," said Jim Blomo, engineering manager for Yelp. "DataVisor's security analytics are an important part of our spam detection system, and helps prevent malicious accounts from interacting with real users and businesses."

"The rapid expansion of online services and mobile apps has led to an explosion of user accounts, ushering in the 'billion-user era,'" said Yinglian Xie, CEO and co-founder of DataVisor. "Cyber thieves are using this growth to their advantage, using fake and compromised accounts to easily hide in the shadows and conduct various forms of fraud against websites and mobile apps. Our mission is to build and restore trust in online communities and services and to protect every one of us legitimate users by finding the hidden enemy lurking within them."

Some estimates predict that financial losses due to cyberfraud targeted at online services will exceed $50 billion in 2015.  "DataVisor's technology is uniquely adept at finding malicious accounts hiding within an online service," said Jon Sakoda, general partner at NEA and DataVisor board member. "Well-organized attack campaigns have armies of 'sleeper cells' that look and behave like benign accounts, only to wake up all at once and launch a full-scale attack on an online service. DataVisor is the only security company able to root out these 'sleeper cells' before they awaken and incur any damage."

You can find out more about this company on the DataVisor blog: http://blog.datavisor.com/