Brisbane-founded Arkose Labs secures strategic investment from PayPal

Arkose Labs, a fraud and abuse prevention startup, has secured a strategic investment from PayPal.

Based in San Francisco with an office in Brisbane, Arkose Labs was originally born out of a Brisbane Startup Weekend as FunCaptcha. Founded by Kevin Gosschalk and Matthew Ford, its first iteration sought to replace text-based captchas with, well, fun image-based captchas.

The current iteration of its technology now combines global telemetry with user behavioural risk assessment and enforcement challenges to defend against issues such as scraping, ticket scalping, spam, auction house abuse, and fake ratings.

The investment from PayPal follows the startup’s raising of a US$6 million ($8.26 million) Series A round led by US Venture Partners in September. Dafina Toncheva, partner with US Venture Partners, and Jeremiah Grossman, founder and CEO of Bit Discovery, also joined the startup’s board of directors.

Arkose Labs stated the fresh funding willI go towards further expanding its product roadmap to include further fraud prevention and digital identity capabilities.

Writing in a blog post, Gosschalk said the investment is a “moment in our timeline that is significant for several reasons”: validation, momentum, and strength.

“It signals to our customers, the industry and any future competitors, that we are not only committed to helping organisations combat the growing online fraud epidemic, but we have the confidence, support and backing of major industry players,” he said.

“When it comes to ecommerce, PayPal is the grandfather and titan of the industry. Their team has recognised the power of the Arkose Labs solution and we are thrilled to have their support.”

According to Gosschalk, Arkose Labs has prevented over US$100 million of fraudulent activity within its customer base over the last 12 months; among its customers are Singapore Airlines, EA, roblox, and Kik.

In turn, he said the backing from PayPal is “gratifying” to the whole Arkose Labs team.

“We have come a long way in the last two years. The journey is exciting, and we are poised to solve the challenges of online fraud and abuse which our customers are facing head-on.”

Image: Kevin Gosschalk.