Estonian startup BotGuard raises €500,000 for cloud-based security system that any business could afford

Tallinn-born startup BotGuard, developer of a cloud-based website security system, has raised €500,000 in seed funding from fellow Estonian firm Tera Ventures and some angel investors.

So-called ‘bad bots’ comb the web and are accused of competitive data mining, personal and financial data harvesting, brute-force attacks, spam, transaction fraud and other cyber treachery. These attacks don’t have to be big or newsworthy to cause damage; more than 70 percent of attacks target small and medium businesses, which have fewer resources to defend themselves. (See the EU Horizon 2020 project Cyber Geiger, which tech.eu is working on.)

The Estonian startup has created a digital fingerprinting technology that selectively blocks bad bot requests in real time. The system adapts on-the-fly to the traffic patterns of a particular website, filtering out only the traffic that poses a threat.

And BotGuard has released its solution at a price point that any business can afford, with plans starting from €1 per month.

Founded last November by Israeli serial entrepreneur Nik Rozenberg and Russian software developer Denis Prochko, the company has collected over 1,000 direct paying customers, plus another 4,000 customers through about a dozen hosting company partnerships.

Outside of Tallinn, team members work remotely from Israel, Germany, Sweden, Brazil, Georgia, Croatia, Canada, the US, Russia and Ukraine.

Image provided by BotGuard