Validating More Than 200 Million Real People and Counting
DETROIT, MI – Are You A Human, the creator of the Internet’s first Verified Human Whitelist™, a people-based technology platform that allows anyone serving content, ads or services on the web to be sure they’re addressing a real human, today announced it has closed a $4.2 million Series A round of financing, bringing the company’s total venture funding to date to $5.2M. Participating in the round were Detroit Venture Partners, MDC Dream Ventures, Foundry Group Angels and NCT Ventures.
Are You a Human’s patented technology analyzes natural user behavior across millions of sites, collecting a plethora of authentication data. Only when a user has been consistently authenticated as a human, are they added to the whitelist, and then re-authenticated continuously each day. Publishers, advertisers or service providers who integrate the Verified Human Whitelist, will know before a page loads whether or not a visitor is a pre-verified human and not a bot.
In fact, in recent tests alongside leading viewability vendors and with select brand partners, campaigns that used the Verified Human Whitelist to optimize to verified humans, achieved a more than 80% viewability rate on programmatic buys.
Bots accounted for more than 61 percent of web traffic in 2014, according to several research reports. Even scarier is that most companies still don’t have any visibility into, or an effective solution for this malicious and evolving problem. It’s a moving target everyone in the industry is trying to fight in any number of ways from blacklisting bots to bot detection. Are You A Human shifts the focus away from bots to serve as a human authentication protocol, like a TSA Precheck, for the Internet, employing proprietary technology to validate and re-verify the online interactions of real people. To date, the Verified Human Whitelist™ has authenticated more than 200 million real people and is currently authenticating humans on more than 1.5 million e-commerce, online banking, social media, media and advertising businesses and online publishers, including Yahoo! and AOL.
“The problems associated with non-human internet traffic are vast– everything from social media spam, content piracy and account hacking to fraudulent data and wasted advertising,” said Ben Trenda, CEO of Are You a Human. “The rise in verification companies is symptomatic of a larger problem — namely, the Internet’s lack of better pathways for automated traffic. The Verified Human Whitelist is unique in that it’s focused on real people first, rather than bots. It’s my opinion that the Internet needs to have a seamless, rich user experience for real people, and a separate experience for non-human users, and you accomplish that by first knowing which users are human, not the inverse.”
“Our clients are investing more of their dollars in digital, but transparency continues to be lacking in many digital environments, particularly in the programmatic ad buying ecosystem. Are You a Human’s technology allows our agencies to be 100% certain we are addressing a verified human each time we buy a piece of ad inventory or a 3rd party data segment,” said Stuart Coleman, VP Digital Strategy & Investments, MDC Partners.
About Are You A Human
Are You A Human is the creator of the Internet’s first Verified Human Whitelist™, a people-based technology platform that allows anyone serving content, ads or services on the web to be sure they’re addressing a real human. The Verified Human Whitelist™ verifies and re-verifies interactions across millions of sites everyday to identify natural human behavior. Are You A Human has authenticated and whitelisted more than 200 million real people to-date, making the Internet a much safer, less cluttered and more profitable place to conduct business. Headquartered in Detroit, Are You A Human was founded in 2011 by Reid Tatoris and Tyler Paxton. For more information visit: http://www.areyouahuman.com/.
