A tech-whiz-turned-bot-blocker, Sam Crowther, is behind Kasada, a tech platform that helps organisations mitigate bot risks. So far, the company has raised $39 million to continue its mission and was recently recognised as one of the most significant solutions in the industry.
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Logging on from Paris, 28-year-old Sam Crowther says he’s been in four time zones in a little under two weeks. But that’s what business calls for when you’re at the head of a global bot mitigation company, protecting 150 million unique users daily.
That company, Kasada, was founded in 2015 when Crowther was 19 and fresh out of a gig at Macquarie Bank. There, his remit laid the foundation for Kasada.
“I was fresh out of high school, and it was a lot of fun,” he says. “They were going through a digital transformation, and I was told to break whatever I could. Think about how someone may want to attack the business and try it. It was free reign for me, and the beauty of it was that the problems I found were made worse or exacerbated by bots. And there was no good solution to that problem set.”
Crowther convinced an angel investor to hand over $50,000, asked a few mates to help out and launched an MVP [minimum viable product] of Kasada out of Newcastle, New South Wales, as a cyber-security business that would protect online, mobile and API channels from system takeover, content scraping and account takeover. The team took less than a year to build
a product to demo to potential customers. Their first was Sportsbet.
“We were four 20-year-olds basically saying, we will try to protect your most invaluable product, which is your online betting platform. There was a bit of scepticism, but we were their only choice.”
The bot problem is significant: Crowther says the company is currently tracking individuals who are making more than $1 million a year committing bot fraud online.
“Success breeds success,” he says. “Now, we’re seeing the commercialisation of these problems, and fraudsters are getting organised and commercially astute.” According to the latest Bad Bot Report, more than a third of internet traffic is generated by automated bots in Australia. Bot fraud is estimated to cost businesses $150 billion.
Kasada’s tech monitors its clients’ site and app traffic to determine whether the consumer is a human or a bot. It’s a similar function to CAPTCHA technology, but Kasada’s differs in that it does not disrupt the customer journey.
“It’s an invisible check that happens quickly so our customers get accurate results, and their customers’ journey is never disrupted. With the severity of online competition, the customer experience must be good.”
Almost a decade later and Crowther has set up offices in Sydney, Melbourne, New York City, San Francisco and London with about 100 staff members. Crowther estimates that up to 90% of revenue comes from the North American business.
“We’re definitely an Aussie business in our DNA, but our customers are majority overseas. I’m proud of what we’ve built, but we’re only really finding our groove now.”
Crowther says the company plans to nail down its North American business and continue its regional expansion strategy. He also says entering new verticals, like the financial services space, and continuing to build the brand and protect customers is on the agenda.
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