SAN FRANCISCO, May 08, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Optery, the first company to offer a free service for finding your personal data on hundreds of data broker websites, announced today that it raised an additional $2.7M in seed funding to modernize and scale personal data protection for consumers and businesses. The round – which will help Optery accelerate product enhancements and expand its team – was led by Bayhouse Capital, with participation from Global Founders Capital, Goodwater Capital, Pioneer Fund, Soma Capital, TRAC, Y Combinator and others. This brings Optery’s total funding to date to $6M.
“Exploitation of personal data remains one of the most pressing issues of our time and is a key enabler for all kinds of bad actors online,” said Michael Stuenkel, Founder and CEO at Bayhouse Capital. “We immediately recognized the growing need for software that manages personal data rights and that Optery’s approach – grounded in automation – is far more accurate and scalable than anything else out there. We’re excited to work with Lawrence and the Optery team to modernize personal data removal and protection.”
In 2022, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received 800,944 complaints, and the losses from those complaints totaled $10.3 billion. From 2018-2022, total complaints were 3.26 million and total reported losses were $27.6 billion. Phishing was the most common threat by far, and represented an eleven-fold increase in complaints from 2018 to 2022. These numbers likely underestimate the scope of the problem, as many crimes go unreported by victims.
Optery’s automated opt out software removes personal information from the internet to reduce the attack surface area for phishing, social engineering, harassment, fraud and doxxing. Optery was awarded "Editors' Choice" by PCMag.com as the most outstanding product in its category.
Phishing, social engineering, identity theft and even harassment are made easier by data brokers who openly post personal information such as phone numbers and home addresses online. Optery is the first company to offer a free report with dozens of screenshots showing where your personal information is being posted online. Optery can also automatically remove you from these sites, clearing your home address, phone number, email and other personal information from the Internet at scale. The company also offers the service to businesses, assisting IT teams with scrubbing employees’ personal information from the web to reduce threats to the business. Tens of thousands of users rely on Optery to prevent attacks and keep their personal data off the internet.
Optery’s founders are Lawrence Gentilello, Chen Atlas, and Dekel Barzilay, Optery’s CEO, CTO, and VP R&D, respectively. Gentilello worked in the consumer data space for a decade at Oracle, BlueKai and Accenture and was the victim of identity theft himself before starting the company. “I’ve seen firsthand the ways data brokers exploit personal data, and the impact of that exploitation on a person’s life,” said Gentilello. “Until Optery, there was no way to automate the identification and removal of personal data from the hundreds of data brokers out there. Existing options could only reach a subset of the data brokers Optery covers or relied on manual removal methods that are time consuming and error prone. Optery’s technology enables us to solve this problem at scale, and aims to make a big dent in bad actors’ ability to hijack personal data for gain.”
Many in the industry fear generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT, if used maliciously, have the potential to increase the exploitation of consumer data. “With the rise of AI, and its voracious appetite for data, consumers need a platform like Optery that puts them in control and manages their data rights at scale,” noted Atlas.
Optery’s patented search technology can pinpoint hundreds of data broker sites posting an individual’s personal data, and then automatically packages up screenshots of the exposed profiles into an exposure report delivered to the user for free in under an hour. One can then reach out to those sites individually to opt out, or sign up for an Optery paid subscription, which automates the opt out process and re-scans the sites monthly to ensure the data isn’t repopulated.
Optery has solutions for individuals and businesses. For a free exposure report, visit https://app.optery.com/signup.
About Optery
Optery is the first company to offer a free report with dozens of screenshots showing where your personal information is being posted by hundreds of data brokers online, and the first to offer IT teams a completely self-service platform for finding and removing employee personal information from the web. Optery can also automatically remove you from these sites, clearing your home address, phone number, email and other personal information from the Internet at scale. The service is used to prevent threats like phishing, social engineering, identity theft, harassment and physical violence. Tens of thousands of users rely on Optery to prevent attacks and keep their personal information off the Internet. Learn more at http://optery.com.
Media contact:
Michelle Faulkner
Big Swing
617-510-6998
Michelle@big-swing.com
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/3483e772-9e55-4097-a8e8-8425f7b16a7f
