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.