ff Ven­ture Cap­i­tal, CIT, Idea Fund Part­ners, Cloud Pow­er Fund, Pied­mont RIA and Tech­Stars are amongst the investors who clubbed togeth­er to inject seed fund­ing worth $1.8 mil­lion into Vir­ginia-based tech start­up, Distil.It.

The increas­ing­ly suc­cess­ful lit­tle firm, which promis­es to pro­tect busi­ness web­sites from web scrap­ing, data min­ing and con­tent theft (along with oth­er igno­ble online endeav­ors), has clear­ly attract­ed the atten­tion of a raft of hard-nosed investors.  But what makes it dif­fer­ent from rival sites like Sen­tor or Siteblackbox?

Why CPN spells success

Accord­ing to the firm’s CEO and co-founder, Rami Essaid, the answer lies in three let­ters: CPN. That’s Con­tent Pro­tec­tion Net­work, the first of its kind to pin­point and block data min­ing and con­tent theft as it aris­es.  It makes deci­sions about a website’s traf­fic in real­time, scan­ning cyber-vis­i­tors metic­u­lous­ly and dis­tin­guish­ing between human cus­tomers and mali­cious bots.  Not only that, it also uses 15 glob­al nodes to reduce serv­er load and accel­er­ate site speed.

Accord­ing to Essaid, Distil.It has seen month-on-month growth of 35 per cent for four con­sec­u­tive months, a fact that seems to have per­suad­ed investors to open their check­books.  But the prob­lem it’s designed to quash has been a grow­ing con­cern for online busi­ness­es, which lose cus­tomers, rev­enue and SEO sta­tus when cyber-vil­lains scrape and copy con­tent.

Unlike its com­peti­tors, Distil.It doesn’t depend on rate lim­it­ing to root out and stamp on bots.  Instead, a connection’s iden­ti­ty is ver­i­fied by what Essaid describes as “sophis­ti­cat­ed code injec­tions” which reli­ably pick out auto­mat­ed agents. Next, it uses a machine learn­ing lay­er to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between human vis­i­tors and bot traf­fic on a site-to-site basis.

Expan­sion ahead

But per­haps the startup’s most dis­tin­guish­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic is that, unlike the com­pe­ti­tion, it builds a sig­na­ture once it appre­hends a mali­cious bot and ensures it nev­er comes back.  All of its cus­tomers then receive the aggre­gat­ed sig­na­tures, effec­tive­ly crowd­sourc­ing the DNA of each bot so that all clients ben­e­fit from every bug snared.

With the new invest­ment, Distil.IT plans to enlarge its cloud net­work foot­print, cre­at­ing four new data cen­ters over the next three months.  It’s also plan­ning an upgrade of the ana­lyt­ics on user portals,
not only help­ing clients iden­ti­fy who’s attempt­ing to attack them, but also help­ing them monetize
their traffic.