DataDome raises $42M to leverage machine learning for confronting bot attacks 

Malicious traffic is something that any organization with a website has to address. According to Imperva, 42.3% of internet traffic belongs to bots, and many of these are designed to crawl through online websites and APIs to identify vulnerabilities. 

In response, companies like bot management provider DataDome have turned Artificial Intelligence (AI) to identify account takeover, credential stuffing, fake account creation and payment fraud threats orchestrated by bots. To support this mission, DataDome today announced it has raised $42 million as part of a Series C funding round.

DataDome’s platform uses machine learning (ML) at the edge and an AI-powered bot detection engine to process over 3 trillion signals a day and automatically identify bot attacks targeting websites, mobile apps and APIs. 

Confronting automated bot attacks  

The announcement comes as more and more organizations are struggling to confront the onslaught of automated website attacks. 

“Attacks leveraging bots have undeniably become a common path to fraud,” said Benjamin Fabre, CEO of DataDome. “To complicate matters, AI is making it easier for threat actors to create sophisticated attacks in minutes that target any point in the customer journey (and profit along the way). This is particularly true for bot-driven attacks.”

“Now consider that cybersecurity and fraud mitigation have traditionally bee3n handled by siloed departments, which enables attackers to take advantage of vulnerabilities,” said Fabre. “It’s a perfect storm.”

By leveraging automation, DataDome functions to assure organizations that the users accessing their websites are real, and also that data and accounts aren’t at risk of compromise. 

Organizations that are experiencing a bot attack on their website also receive 24/7 support from DataDome’s specialist threat intelligence team so they can remediate the incident and maintain normal operations.

Reviewing the bot security market 

DataDome’s solution falls loosely within the bot security market, which MarketsandMarkets estimates will increase from a value of $408 million in 2021 to $983 million by 2026.

Some of DataDome’s main competitors are content delivery networks (CDNs) like Cloudflare and Akamai, which offer additional bot management solutions. 

Cloudflare, which raised $975.2 million in revenue in 2022, uses ML to analyze traffic and score requests to identify anomalous activity and bot attacks. Traffic fingerprinting enables the solution to pinpoint bot traffic and identify credential stuffing, content scraping, Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attempts targeting apps and credit card stuffing attempts. 

Similarly, Akamai, which recently announced raising over $3.6 billion in revenue in 2022, offers its own traffic protection product; Bot Manager. Bot Manager uses AI models and fingerprinting to analyze user behavior against a continuously updated directory of over 1,500 bots. 

However, one of the key differentiators between DataDome and these providers, the company says, is its external security support.

“DataDome detects and responds to attacks with unparalleled speed, accuracy, reliability and expertise using ML monitored by our in-house Security Operation Center (SOC),” said Fabre.