RedMarlin on aggressive staff build out after USD 10m Series A
RedMarlin on aggressive staff build out after USD 10m Series A
TIM LEEMASTER
RedMarlin, the Los Altos, California-based corporate fraud prevention platform using AI, is planning an aggressive staff buildout in the wake of its recent USD 10m Series A, cofounders Abhishek Dubey and Shashi Prakash said.
The company is currently hiring heads of sales, marketing, business development and customer success. Those four section heads would then go on to build small teams, the cofounders said.
Over the next twelve months the company plans to bring in around 18 new staff members, and that number could hit as many as 25, Dubey says.
“We’re building a go-to-market team who can define strategy,” Dubey said.
The company had only three employees when it closed the Series A. Besides Dubey, who acts as CEO, and Chief Scientist Prakash, the company also employs Betty Kayton, as CFO.
The round, announced November 5, was led by the family office Thomvest Ventures and Crosslink Capital.
RedMarlin says it has a 99.8% detection rate with 0.001% false positives. That level of success suggests high quality data, something many AI firms struggle with. The two said they realized early that could be an issue so started narrow and small, targeting only 50 brands for example.
“We knew data was an issue from the start so we built tools to support data and classify data even before dabbling with models,” Dubey said. “A lot of people discount that.”
Starting with an initial feed of a few examples of unstructured, or raw, online counterfeiting that were amplified with machine learning the company produced clusters of data that then helped them to start building models, Dubey said. They declined to identify any of the brands they are working with.
The company’s focus on both text and data, rather than just one or the other, also provides a richer set of source data to work from, they added. “That provides very high accuracy,” Dubey said.
[Read Eye on A.I. coverage on data issues here]
Dubey and Prakash met when they both worked at Cisco and founded RedMarlin in 2017. The initial idea of the company was driven by the desire to make cybersecurity a more proactive space, Dubey said.
The company also opted early to focus on tracking down fraudulent websites and detecting phishing scams, while most of the industry was concerned about ransomware.
“The biggest problem was phishing and counterfeit sites not ransomware,” Dubey said.
The two founders said the company is generating revenue and year-on-year revenue has jumped tenfold, according to the press release at the time of the Series A. With a low burn rate and cost of goods the company, at this point, could be profitable, Dubey said, adding its profit margin was 90%.
The company was bootstrapped before the Series A and while Dubey said the company is focused on its “go-to market” strategy and headcount another round of financing in the near future would not be out of the question.
“In six or eight months we may evaluate the potential of a Series B, or we may not. It will depend on how fast the company is growing,” Dubey said. “But we’re not thinking in terms of timelines right now”
RedMarlin also operates CheckPhish.ai, a free, open-source tool for real-time detection of fraudulent web links.