Area served Worldwide CEO Rami Essaid Founded 2011 | Number of employees 100–200 Headquarters San Francisco Type of business Privately held | |
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Number of locations 5 offices (2016); 17 CDN Nodes (2015) Key people Rami Essaid (CEO)
Engin Akyol (CTO)
Andrew Stein (Chief Scientist) Products Bot Mitigation & Protection
API Security
Threat Intelligence Services Blocking Malicious Bots
Web Scraping
Content Theft
Click Fraud
Web Application Security
Form/Comment Spam
Online Fraud
CDN Founders Andrew Stein, Engin Akyol, Rami Essaid Profiles | ||
Distil Networks is an American cybersecurity company founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its main product provides bot detection and mitigation. Distil also has corporate offices in London, England, Raleigh, North Carolina, Arlington, Virginia, and Stockholm, Sweden.
Contents
History
Distil Networks, originally called Distil.it, was founded in April 2011 by Rami Essaid, Engin Akyol and Andrew Stein, claiming to be the first website bot detection and mitigation solution of its kind. The company name was later changed to Distil Networks. When asked why he founded Distil Networks, Essaid cited his objective was to “help companies tell the difference between a real person and an automated computer program on their web infrastructure in order to prevent web scraping, competitive data mining, account hijacking, online fraud, form spam, man-in-the-browser attacks, digital ad fraud and downtime.”
Key investors in Distil Networks include Bessemer Venture Partners, Foundry Group, ff Venture Capital, Techstars, IDEA Fund Partners, Militello Capital, CIT GAP Funds, and Correlation Ventures.
The company has also raised capital through seed money rounds, including individual investors contributing more than $200,000 in one week via AngelList. On May 28, 2014, the company secured $10 million in Series A funding to help fund the growth and expansion of the company.
Initially the Distil Networks client base consisted largely of digital publishers concerned about their news content being stolen and re-used on competitors’ websites. However, due to the wide application of automation in website abuse, web application attacks, business logic attacks, and online fraud, Distil Networks soon branched into protecting other types of websites against malicious bots and threats they create.
Distil Networks raised an additional $21 million on June 30, 2015 in a Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners to scale up its operations bringing their total financing to date to $44 million.
Technology
Distil Networks offers products which website owners can use to block web bots and reduce click fraud, web scraping, performance problems, etc.
Its bot detection technology does real-time in-line traffic inspection to analyze more than 40 attributes of each visitor, building a fingerprint to identify each bot.
Distil networks offers its solutions via a Content Delivery Network (CDN), physical or virtual appliances, or a Software Development Kit (SDK) for Native Applications.