Impermium is a cybersecurity technology startup that protects over 1.5M sites and has processed over 8B total transactions in its 3-year history. The company’s advanced risk-evaluation platform improves account management by identifying fraudulent registrations, compromised logins, and risky transactions. It has proven successful at stopping fraudulent user account registrations in real-time — using a blend of machine learning, statistical anomaly detection, and a proprietary database of malicious actors — for hundreds of transactions per second from many of the largest consumer Internet companies.
It looks like it was founded in 2010 by a few ex-Yahoo! spam guys and had raised $9mm in 2 rounds from the typical list of tech VCs. LinkedIn lists 20 employees, so probably 30ish total.
Playing devil's advocate, assuming what you are saying is correct (customers were guinea pigs and this was all about the exit) - its really tough not sounding like a douche.
When writing that sort of copy, you have to always take the high road.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/21/impermium/
"Rather than use an internal data services team, the company turned to Kaggle, a startup that hosts data-driven competitions.
From around the world, statisticians competed to build a tool that combines machine learning and natural language processing to root out malicious commentary. The winner received $7,000 — their solution was the most accurate with a false positive rate of less than one percent.
After posting the competition, the company received 154 submissions from contenders, and made some interesting discoveries about the nature of hate speech. "
Impermium is Joining Google!
January 15, 2014
When we founded Impermium three years ago, our mission was to help rid the web of spam, fraud, and abuse. By joining Google, our team will extend a special thank you to Accel Partners, AOL Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Data Collective, Freestyle Capital, Greylock Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Morado Ventures, and the Social+Capital Partnership.
I think they were used by Tumblr for anti-spam and catching bad registrations.
