Distil Networks Announces $21M in Funding Led By Bessemer Venture Partners

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 30, 2015) - Distil Networks, Inc., the global leader in bot detection and mitigation, today announced that it has closed a $21 million round of Series B financing. New investor Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) led this round, with participation from current investors Foundry, TechStars, ff Venture Capital, Idea Fund and Correlation Ventures. David Cowan, partner at BVP and co-founder of VeriSign, Good Technology and Defense.net, will join Distil's board of directors. Funding will be used to expand sales, marketing and engineering. Distil's total funding is $38 million to date.

In a world where only 41 percent of web traffic originates from humans, Distil offers the first easy and accurate way to defend websites against malicious bots used for web scraping, brute force attacks, competitive data mining, account hijacking, unauthorized vulnerability scans, spam, man-in-the-middle attacks and click fraud -- all without impacting users. Distil's unique approach monitors every single Web request and builds a signature, or fingerprint, of every incoming connection, allowing the company to accurately detect, flag and block that unique fingerprint for all other sites under Distil's protection. Having blocked more than 50 billion bad bots to date, Distil has the largest known database of malicious bots.

"Malicious bots have become increasingly more pervasive, sophisticated and detrimental to companies around the world, and Distil is the only solution that is purpose built to identify and stop 99.99 percent of bad bots without affecting users," said Distil Networks CEO and Co-founder Rami Essaid. "This latest round of funding combined with the momentum we've experienced since bringing our product to market further validates the need for a superior level of protection against malicious bots from attacking a company's Web infrastructure."

"Distil's cloud service now has the largest database of known bots, and gets smarter every minute," said David Cowan, a BVP partner and Distil board member. "By blocking bot traffic, Distil cuts off entire classes of automated fraud and cyber attacks."

Over the last year, Distil has achieved several key milestones, including:

• Grew revenue by more than 400 percent year-over-year.
• Secured dozens of Fortune 500 customers, as well as innovative brands such as Glassdoor, CrunchBase, FindTheBest.com and Wayfair.
• Opened a third office and doubled its workforce, including key hires from Microsoft, IBM and Cisco.
• Gartner recognized Distil Networks as a Representative Vendor in their Market Guide for Online Fraud Detection.

According to Gartner, Fraudsters are "spreading their attacks over thousands of IP addresses -- many of which are purposefully chosen to originate in locations that appear legitimate (for example, in the same geographic area that a target victim lives in)." Furthermore, "They are also slowing down their scripted attacks to move at the pace of an average human."¹

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About Distil Networks

Distil Networks, the global leader in bot detection and mitigation, is the first easy and accurate way to identify and police malicious website traffic, blocking 99.9% of bad bots without impacting legitimate users. Distil protects against web scraping, brute force attacks, competitive data mining, account hijacking, unauthorized vulnerability scans, spam, man-in-the-middle attacks and click fraud. Slash the high tax that bots place on your internal teams and web infrastructure by outsourcing the problem to the team with a maniacal focus on blocking malicious bots. For more information on Distil Networks, visit us at www.distilnetworks.com or follow @DISTIL on Twitter.

About Bessemer Venture Partners

Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) invests in early-stage and hyper-growth startups, partnering closely with entrepreneurs to build durable businesses. BVP is a global firm with offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, Cambridge, New York, Bangalore and Herzliya. With $4 billion under management, BVP invests anywhere from $100,000 to $75 million in innovative companies like Pinterest, Twilio, Box, LinkedIn, Shopify, Yelp, Skype and CornerstoneOnDemand. Over 100 BVP companies have gone public -- in the last three years alone, BVP has had 46 exits (IPO and M&A) and made new investments in more than 85 companies. Learn more at www.bvp.com and follow us on Twitter @BessemerVP.

Bessemer Venture Partners is actively investing in cybersecurity and has now funded over 30 cybersecurity companies. See bvp.com/cyber to learn more about our practice.

¹ Gartner, Market Guide for Online Fraud Detection, Avivah Litan, Jonathan Care, April 27, 2015