Transform 2021

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July 12-16

Bot defense startup DataDome today announced it has raised $35 million in a series B round led by Elephant. The company says it will use the funds, which bring its total raised to nearly $40 million, to invest in R&D as it looks to expand its customer base.

While consumer spending in the U.S. dipped last month year-over-year, the pandemic has supercharged ecommerce. According to data from IBM’s U.S. Retail Index, business closures and shelter-in-place orders accelerated the shift to digital shopping by five years, with online shopping projected to grow nearly 20% in 2020. But the surge has also coincided with a rise in bot attacks. Seventy-one percent of companies report having experienced an increase in the number of successful bot attacks, with ecommerce seeing the largest increase of any segment.

New York-based DataDome, which was cofounded by Benjamin Fabre and Fabien Grenier, provides an AI-powered software-as-a-service solution that secures marketplaces against web scraping, account takeover, and payment fraud. The company’s bot detection engine processes more than a trillion pieces of data every day from 25 worldwide points of presence.

“DataDome is the third company cofounded by Benjamin Fabre and Fabien Grenier. Their latest success was TrendyBuzz, a social media monitoring company acquired by Linkfluence in 2014,” a spokesperson told VentureBeat via email. “Benjamin and Fabien soon realized that similar techniques were being used at an alarming rate by hackers to build bad bots and attack digital commerce businesses. Compounding the matter, there was a lack of easily deployable solutions to combat these attacks.”

Above: DataDome’s online dashboard.

Image Credit: DataDome

DataDome’s bot prevention software compares requests to a website, mobile app, or API with an in-memory pattern database, using a blend of AI to decide whether access to pages should be granted or not. The company’s algorithms — which are fine-tuned to individual attack vectors — analyze billions of requests daily and update continuously in order to identify and prevent familiar and zero-day threats.

DataDome detects and classifies attacks in a dashboard for monitoring, analysis, and remediation. For more granular needs, it offers a custom rules function that allows users to block human traffic from countries they’re not selling to, for example. DataDome also sends real-time notifications via email or Slack whenever a site comes under attack. And because the platform enriches requests to websites, apps, and APIs with ID tags in real time, DataDome enables customers to get daily or weekly bot traffic email reports and monitor for false positives.

“We collect and process hundreds of billions of signals in real time every day — including HTTP information, user mouse movements, mobile app touch events — to create huge datasets,” the spokesperson said. “Supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised models are used and stacked up to detect bots from the very first request. Datasets are analyzed per request, per session, per IP, at different time scales on one or multiple customers’ traffic.”

Uptick in attacks

According to Gartner, by 2024 more than 60% of online retailers will rely exclusively on machine learning for online fraud detection. It’s CEO Genier’s assertion that the recent uptick in attacks highlights the need for solutions like DataDome. DataDome’s own research found a 47% increase in bot fraud attacks against businesses over the past six months, with the majority originating from abroad.

Indeed, respondents to an MIT and Darktrace survey said traditional security solutions can’t anticipate new AI-driven attacks, and 96% said they’re adopting “defensive AI” to remedy this. Here, “defensive AI” refers to self-learning algorithms that understand normal user, device, and system patterns in an organization and detect unusual activity without relying on historical data. For example, given a strain of ransomware an enterprise hasn’t encountered in the past, defensive AI can identify the novel and abnormal patterns of behavior and stop the ransomware even if it isn’t associated with publicly known compromise indicators.

According to Grenier, DataDome’s annual recurring revenue currently stands at $15 million, and he expects it to increase 100% over the next 12 months.

“We owe our current hypergrowth to our over 150 customers — like Axel Springer, AngelList Talent, Australia Post, and Foot Locker — who have placed their trust in us to protect them from malicious bot traffic and online fraud,” Grenier said. “With its expertise in both ecommerce and software-as-a-service, Elephant is an ideal partner as we continue to scale aggressively, particularly in the U.S., in order to serve even more ecommerce businesses and fulfill our mission to free the internet of fraudulent traffic.”

Existing investor ISAI also participated in DataDome’s round announced today.

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Presented by Unity 3D

2020 was a tale of two stories: While worldwide physical retail sales slowed, ecommerce boomed. Out of necessity, consumers embraced digital shopping in droves, accelerating the shift away from brick-and-mortar stores by roughly five years.

Pandemic challenges have cut across B2B businesses and B2C brands, turning digital storefronts into their most important piece of real estate seemingly overnight. While savvy companies have already invested in compelling ways to showcase their goods online, many still struggle. Here are three ways to level up how you showcase your products online to better convert shoppers into buyers.

1. Create product imagery more efficiently

Even as marketing becomes more experiential and three-dimensional, static digital media still rules the day. Product images are the most influential factor in a typical purchasing decision for online shoppers.

But acquiring the necessary volume of images is becoming more difficult, especially as the number of product variants have multiplied in this era of personalization and customization. Teams have traditionally relied on costly, logistics-intensive photoshoots or offline rendering tools to generate imagery but are increasingly turning to more efficient means.

At a recent event, Volkswagen’s visualization team revealed that its global websites present 25 million images per day to consumers as they configure their dream VW. To operate at that scale, the automaker has created a highly efficient production pipeline with real-time 3D rendering at the core.

VW reported its digital media production process is 75% faster — from three months to three weeks — when it uses real-time tools vs traditional offline rendering. Workflow improvements like these help teams meet consumer expectations for product imagery faster and more cost efficiently.

2. Captivate buyers with interactive, real-time 3D configurators

Today, buyers expect the ability to build their dream configuration and visualize their choices, whether it’s a personal jet or a pair of shoes. They want to be able to see exactly what they are buying before making the final purchasing decisions. Yet the majority of enterprises (61%) identify product configuration as their top visualization challenge, according to a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Unity. When all product details are not available in a visual format, it becomes more difficult to empower buyers to make the best choice and commit to buying quickly.

On the other hand, when buyers have the agency to explore and interact with your products, they get more invested in their “creations” and often spend more. Church’s Footwear saw this first-hand when it gave consumers the opportunity to customize its most iconic shoe.

Created in partnership with SmartPixels, a 3D product configurator on Church’s website contributed to nearly half of made-to-order sales and generated 35% higher average transaction value (ATV) than retail ATV.

Making the jump to 3D no longer requires an army of developers thanks to new codeless solutions. With RestAR, acquiring realistic 3D models is no longer a complex exercise — every consumer product can now be recreated in 3D using only a mobile device. As for interactive authoring and content creation, Unity Forma enables marketing teams to produce and publish interactive 3D product configurators and digital media from 3D product data without programming skills.

From dream home designs to car configurators, brands across industries are finding real-time 3D a highly effective way to communicate the complexities and intricacies of customizable goods. Being able to offer high-fidelity representations of products results in better understanding by buyers and upsell opportunities for sellers.

3. Power product discovery with augmented reality (AR)

Of course, even when showcasing products in 3D, buyers interact with them on a 2D display. Augmented reality (AR) changes that by bringing products beyond screens and into your immediate environment for contextual understanding.

AR is not just a glossy add-on — it drives real results. 3D models in AR increase conversion rates by up to 250% on websites, according to Shopify. Notable brands like IKEA, Porsche, and Stratasys have embraced the technology.

In Stratasys’s case, the 3D printing company was forced to pivot quickly at the onset of the pandemic when it had to shelve its physical event plans to debut a new printer. Working with the immersive studio Visionaries 777, Stratasys developed an AR application for iOS and Android devices in a matter of weeks that attracted strong interest for its new product on a global scale.

The pandemic accelerated consumer behavior trends toward ecommerce that were already in motion. Companies that had a head start on this shift reaped the benefits, and those that were caught flat-footed now see the value in the agility and flexibility of real-time 3D workflows and tools.

The teams that have embraced this transition see no going back to their old ways. Creating dynamic marketing content that resonates with customers and communicates in entirely new ways is a game changer. Durable goods manufacturers are now all too aware of how urgently they need these capabilities and how much they stand to gain — or lose — without them.

Julien Faure is the vice president and general manager, verticals at Unity.

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