Description
Pindrop Security is an American information security company that provides risk scoring for phone calls to detect fraud and authenticate callers. Pindrop Security technology analyzes 147 different features of a phone call that helps identify the uniqueness of a device and attaches it to a caller. In 2015, Pindrop screened more than 360 million calls was a concept developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Vijay Balasubramaniyan, a computer science graduate from India studying the traits of wanted versus unwanted phone calls, teamed with his thesis advisor Mustaque Ahamad to launch a VentureLab project called Telineage in September 2010. Balasubramaniyan, Ahamad and two colleagues presented an ACM paper on what would become Pindrop's core technology.
Balasubramanian's idea was to acoustically fingerprint phone calls and associate that data with the phone number. In 2011, he and Paul Judge founded Pindrop as a voice security company that combats fraud by analyzing and assigning risk to phone calls.
The company obtained a license to the intellectual property from Georgia Tech Research Corporation, while VentureLab supported the company for a Phase I commercialization grant from the Georgia Research Alliance. In the same year, Pindrop placed second in Startup Riot, was named one of Top 40 Most Innovative companies in Georgia by the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), and won the TAG/GRA Business Launch Competition. Under the name Telineage, Pindrop also won National Science Foundation SBIR Phase I and Phase II awards.
In 2012, Pindrop raised $1 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, other venture capital firms and several angel investors. In June 2013, the company closed an $11 million Series A investment round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Citi Ventures and also including Felicis Ventures and Redpoint, using the funds to scale up engineering, operations, sales and marketing in the US, Canada and Europe. In February 2015, Pindrop raised $35 million in a Series B round led by Institutional Venture Partners.
Their employee headcount totaled 70 at the beginning of 2015, which increased to 100 by June. In July, Pindrop released Fraud Detection System 2.4 (FDS), providing new tools for fraud analysts and call center technologists. Pindrop's 2015 revenue tripled, while its customer base doubled.
Pindrop Security raised another $75 million in 2016. Google Capital led the Series C round, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, GV and others, bringing the company's total funding to $122 million. It was a rare case of both Google Capital and Google Ventures (now GV) investing in the same startup.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pindrop_Security
