Human Security Raises $50M+ to Take On Click Fraud Defense

A bot mitigation behemoth led by the former president of Recorded Future raised $50 million to enhance detection quality and take on click-fraud prevention.

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Human Security said the growth capital will help the New York-based company enhance its data science and engineering capabilities and pursue logically adjacent market opportunities such as advertising integrity. CEO Stu Solomon said the money will help Human address major concerns in the media and enterprise sectors, further the firm’s bot mitigation leadership, and drive detection quality in the digital ecosystem.

“I could have taken more,” Solomon said. “I decided not to, in a very thoughtful and strategic fashion, to be able to put the right dollars at work into targeted investments, to unlock these logically adjacent market opportunities… Also to make sure that I’m specifically investing in the things that matter most right now, which is really around the engineering and data science talent necessary to unlock these.”

Human, founded in 2012, most recently completed a $100 million growth funding round in January 2022 that – like the most recent round – was also led by WestCap. The company has been led since January by Solomon, who spent five years at Recorded Future – half as president -, three years at Optiv – including as CTO – four years at iSight Partners, and five years at Bank of America (see: Why Cyberthreats in Ad Tech Mirror Traditional Enterprises).

What’s Driving the Need for Click-Fraud Defense, Ad Integrity

Solomon limited the company’s latest funding round to $50 million to enable targeted investments and the scaling of Human’s platform while ensuring a path to profitability via thoughtful spending. Having WestCap atop the latest funding round brings significant operational expertise to Human, with the longstanding investment firm tapping its deep industry knowledge to provide strategic guidance.

“They’re operators at heart, and so they inherently understand what it means to build a good business, and they’re pretty darn excited about the market opportunity at the same time,” Solomon told Information Security Media Group. “So it’s this great amalgamation of coaching, advice and ‘been there, done that’ that just makes them really terrific partners.”

Human’s expansion into adjacent markets, particularly around advertising integrity, is driven by the natural intersection between digital advertising and e-commerce, according to Solomon. He pointed out that as the digital world becomes more interconnected, it is critical to manage the sanctity of digital transactions across both the media and enterprise sectors.

“The idea that digital ad content and that a digital buying experience are not linked is just proving to be a false assumption,” Solomon said. “In modern e-commerce, they are absolutely linked. Defenders of those positions, as well as marketers and those responsible for digital trust and safety initiatives, are seeing that inherent linkage between digital ad content and account-level transactional behaviors.”

Human’s media business currently excels at identifying invalid traffic, and Solomon wants to expand the offering to cover click-fraud defense and advertising integrity as part of the platform’s continued growth. Click-fraud defense is a significant challenge for Human’s media clients, and Solomon said the company wants to offer more comprehensive protection for advertisers, agencies and publishers.

“This is all about completeness of the platform and journey,” Solomon said. “When you think about how to protect against and identify early-on fraud scenarios that are logical that you should expect to see in this environment. So, this is really about rounding out the cleanness of the approach to give our clients something to be able to consolidate their perspectives.”

Why Human Plans to Double Down on Data Science

Human is using AI and machine learning to enhance data clustering and provide faster, more accurate fraud detection, with Solomon stressing the need for timely, actionable intelligence for clients delivered through easy-to-use playbooks. By clustering behaviors, Solomon said Human aims to process data at high speeds and volumes to proactively identify fraudulent activity that typically hides in large datasets.

“Identify patterns that would normally be hiding in the noise,” Solomon said. “Using machine learning to further create clusters is one component. The second component in proactive identification is actually arming our clients with the thing that I think matters most – an ability to actually consume the data effectively and apply it quickly so that version of good intelligence is timely, accurate and actionable.”

From a personnel standpoint, Solomon said Human is expanding its data science team, seeking people with deep expertise and curiosity. Solomon said the company’s current strength lies in the analytical skills of its team, but more resources are needed to address challenges in both media and enterprise sectors. Human employs 400 people today, and Solomon expects that figure to increase substantially.

“This is all about adding additional resource to our capabilities and using it in two ways,” Solomon said. “Number one, as we talked about earlier, to be able to create better and higher-fidelity detection capability and speed to value for our clients to be able to have ease of use to harness this data. And then the other piece is to start to apply to other problem sets that we haven’t applied it to before.”

Human’s immediate focus is on organic investment, Solomon said, with the newly raised capital going directly toward building and scaling internal capabilities. While acquisitions like PerimeterX and Clean.io have shaped Human’s platform, Solomon said future expansion will rely more on in-house development. And while exit strategies may emerge in the future, Human’s current focus is solely on organic growth (see: Human Takes on Media Malvertising With Clean.io Acquisition).

“My expectation is that we realize the full potential that we have in front of us by moving into some of these largely tangential markets while continuing to double-down on our core products,” Solomon said. “There is very clear growth opportunity for us over the next couple of years. I think that organic growth will ultimately drive us to a position where we create optionality for different exit scenarios.”