It has been another year of record revenue growth with us signing on several of the largest banks, brokerages and retailers in the US. What started off as a simple research question – “Where is this phone call really coming from?” – has burgeoned into the entire field of phoneprinting where we are able to identify individual voice devices just from their audio characteristics. Along the way, not knowing the answer to that question has resulted in a 10 billion dollar voice fraud issue across enterprise call centers. With our accurate anti-fraud solutions we have successfully helped several of these call centers stop tens of millions of dollars from leaving their organizations, reducing their reliance on knowledge-based authentication and thereby reducing call center handling times.
We are now seeing a large number of organizations that are realizing that their call centers are the weakest link. What seemed like forgetful customers repeatedly asking call center agents more questions are now revealed to be sophisticated fraud actors. In several cases they are trying to probe for additional pieces of information to complement their latest data breach (Home Depot, Target). Organizations are finally realizing that their defenses need to be equivalent across channels as they cannot have advanced technologies protect their online channels and nothing protecting their call centers.
In order to address this growing threat, Pindrop today announces a $35 million Series B investment round. This is one of the largest funding rounds ever in information security. It’s a milestone for Pindrop but it really speaks to the growth of voice fraud and the need for better anti-fraud and authentication solutions in the call center. We will use the funding to continue to grow Pindrop. We’re hiring across the board, especially in customer support, engineering, sales and marketing. We will also be expanding across newer verticals, geographies and products.
Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) leads the investment, with reinvestment from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Citi Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Webb Investment Network. Somesh Dash of IVP will be joining our board. Somesh has a very different, consumer take on things and this will help achieve our larger vision of securing every single voice interaction.
Right now as we speak millions of transactions are happening in the voice channel. An elderly lady is checking to make sure her retirement account is still whole. A millennial is ordering the latest IPhone 6. Come join us as an engineer, as a sales rep, as a customer as we make sure these interactions are trustworthy, secure and everyone knows “Where is this phone call really coming from?”.
Vijay Balasubramaniyan
Co-founder & CEO
Pindrop Security