Featured Startup Pitch: Distil Networks wants to rid the web of malicious bots and data theft

By Rami Essaid, Distil Networks co-founder and CEO

Elevator Pitch: Distil Networks blocks malicious bots attacking your website. These automated attacks are responsible for fraud, data theft and slowing down your web application performance. Distil prevents web scraping, eliminates form spam and click fraud, reduces infrastructure costs, and helps regain your competitive advantage.

Product/Service Description

Distil Networks offers the first ever cloud-based bot detection and mitigation solution. It incorporates the world’s largest bot-fingerprint database with technology to identify, track and mitigate bots in real time. Distil uniquely tracks each bot via a proprietary fingerprinting algorithm with over 40 variables, resulting in bot detection with 99.99 percent reliability. By combining fingerprinting of website visitor connections and machine learning algorithms used to detect online behavioral anomalies, Distil helps businesses stop bots before they inflict real business damage.

Founders’ Story

Distil Networks was started in 2011, but the foundation was laid a decade earlier at North Carolina State University. I was a computer engineering major along with co-founder and middle school friend Engin Akyol. We soon became friends with co-founder Andrew Stein, and despite living in different cities after college we remained close, always celebrating each other’s birthdays with a trip somewhere.

Eventually, we decided to form our own company with a focus on bot security, as each of us had a unique perspective on the bot security issue. I had cloud security experience along with sales and marketing experience, Engin had a decade of networking and security experience, and Andrew had spent the past seven years building bots and web scrapers. Together we pooled our talents to create a company with the common goal of making the web a safer place.

Market Opportunity

We believe anti-bot services will grow to be the next billion-dollar market, but the industry is at its infancy right now. For the first time since the web was created, companies are feeling an overwhelming pain induced by malicious bots and can no longer solve the problem with transitional security tools like firewalls and WAFS. It is now clear that a purpose-build solution is needed—and Distil is leading the charge.

How We Differentiate From the Competition

Distil Networks is the first purpose-built solution to help companies detect and mitigate malicious bots. Not only do we have more years of experience than anyone else, but we also have more customers, large and small, that use our bot blocking solution.

Business Model

Our solution is packaged as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) that can be deployed in the cloud or on premise. Our explosive growth hasn’t come from a large sales force or huge marketing budgets; instead we concentrate our efforts on evangelizing the issues that our customers care about. What we’ve found is that the more we help educate the market, the more customers seek us out.

Current Needs

We have just closed a $10 million dollar round of Series A funding and have the backing of tremendous venture capital firms including Foundry Group, Techstars, ff Venture Capital, IDEA Fund Partners and Militello Capital. We have over a dozen Fortune 500 customers and have key partnerships with Rackspace, SoftLayer, Microsoft, Dyn and more. We are currently growing our workforce and opening new offices in Raleigh, North Carolina, and San Francisco to meet customer demand, engage in potential new partnerships, and expand our reach into Silicon Valley.

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Headquarters: Arlington, Virginia