The round was backed by Swedish private equity giant EQT, with support from existing investors, including Malcolm Turnbull’s Turnbull & Partners, Westpac’s VC fund Reinventure, CSIRO-backed Main Sequence and OIF Ventures, and in the US, New York’s StepStone Group and Californian VC Ten Eleven.
The Sydney-founded cybersecurity startup, founded in 2015 by a then-teenage Sam Crowther, first raised $2.5 million in 2018, followed by a $7 million Series A in late 2019, when the CIA’s VC fund, In-Q-Tel (IQT) joined the cap table. A US$10 (A$15m) Series B in mid-2020 was followed by Kasada’s penultimate raise, a US$23m (A$34m) series C in late 2021.
The company kicked off when Crowther had just left high school in Newcastle, and built an MVP with $50,000 in angel funding.
Kasada founder and CEO Sam Crowther
Crowther who was based in New York for six years, recently returned to Sydney. The US now generates 90% of Kasada’s income.
The company now has around 100 staff in Sydney and Melbourne as well as various locations around the US. Crowther is currently on the hunt for a new executive assistant.
Kasada has two products – one for bot defence, the other for fraud protection, dealing with a range of problems, from account takeover and fake account creation to API protection, CAPTCHA alternatives, content scraping and Gen AI abuse. Preventing screen scraping is a core capability.
The platform is used by the likes of REA Group, FlyBuys, Crocs, PointsBet and the Hyatt Hotels chain.
The cost of bot attacks has been estimated at up to US$186 billion annually, with that number expected to escalate dramatically in the AI era.
Digital ad fraud alone hit US$88bn in 2023 and that figure is expected to nearly double to US$172bn by 2028.
