Forter raises $300m in Series F round, tripling value to $3bn

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-commerce fraud-prevention company Forter has raised $300m in Series F funding round, almost tripling its value to $3bn.

Tiger Global Management led the round, which saw participation from Third Point Ventures and Adage Capital Management. Existing investors also participated, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, March Capital, NewView Capital, Salesforce Ventures and Scale Venture Partners.

The announcement comes six months after Forter completed its $125m Series E funding round. It plans to use the additional funding to expand its operations globally to help more companies tackle fraud.

Michael Reitblat, CEO and co-founder at Forter, said: “We have set a new standard for trust in commerce. Forter’s platform brings together merchants, banks and payment providers to dramatically improve authorisation rates, eliminate false declines and allow consumers to shop with greater convenience and enjoy a more personalised, secure experience.”

Over the past 12 months, Forter has doubled the size of its global network of merchants to exceed $250 billion in annual online transactions. This comes as fraud levels have increased significantly at the hands of the pandemic, with scammers taking advantage of vulnerable people using Covid-19. Figures from UK Finance show that £207.8m was lost to authorised push payment (APP) fraud in the first half of 2020. These figures are on par with losses in the same period in 2019.

GlobalData research suggests that banks should use AI to protect against ever-evolving cybercriminals. Machine learning and data science tools can be used to combat cyber threats as ML can identify the normal pattern of behaviour for customers and raise the alarm if there is a deviation from this norm. This may prompt manual intervention, or the threats may be automatically countered.

Banks can also add an extra layer of protection using identity tools such as facial recognition.