

Impermium acquired by Google - loganlinn
https://www.impermium.com/

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mikeyouse
From Crunchbase:

 _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.

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saurabhnanda
Is it just me or does anyone else feel lile they're thanking their customers
for being guinea pigs for experimenting their WIP.systems. That the end game
was always a Google acquisition and these customers were just a way to prove
that something of value had been built. Now that it is done, so long, and
thanks for all the fish.

~~~
saurabhnanda
Okay, why the negative votes? Just read their announcement. It reads like a
farewell note to their current customers (at least to me).

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cpayne
I read your comment as being a cynical.

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.

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VladRussian2
best $7K spent:

[http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/21/impermium/](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. "

~~~
jboggan
They probably spent twice that - Kaggle takes a cut.

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dictum
_Mental Summarize:_

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.

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joelrunyon
So what exactly did they do?

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kwestro
Impermium protects SaaS application users from account hijacking and account
compromise.

~~~
squintychino
so what exactly did they do?

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jkarneges
Livefyre was one of their early users. Every comment submitted into any
comment widget hosted by Livefyre was sent over to Impermium for spam
analysis. Impermium had a pretty cool 2 phase process where they'd give you a
rough spam score within seconds and then a more accurate score within minutes.

Livefyre had some sophisticated behavior as a result. Comments were always
pushed live to other page viewers immediately while simultaneously sent to
Impermium, then revoked (via live update) if either the first or second pass
through Impermium resulted in a spam indication. Email notifications weren't
released until the second pass indicated nonspam.

Not sure if Livefyre still uses Impermium today or what this buyout may mean
for them, but I always thought the concept was pretty cool.

~~~
gobengo
Disqus did (does?) use Impermium as well.

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jonalmeida
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know how much they were acquired for,
seeing has Google dropped ~3 billion on Nest..

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eridius
I don't think I've ever seen anyone round off 200 million dollars before.

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malandrew
Forbes did it:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2014/01/15/goog...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2014/01/15/google-
and-nest-the-long-and-tetchy-view/)

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caiob
Google is on a shopping spree, Eh?!

