Edison Partners, a growth equity investment firm, has led USD26 million funding round in Las Vegas-based ecommerce security and website performance company NS8. The company will use the funds to accelerate product innovation and go-to-market expansion.
Ecommerce fraud is growing at nearly twice the rate as online sales, according to Experian, and experts estimate that fraud costs merchants more than 7.5 percent of their annual revenue. BI Intelligence also reports that US companies experience a loss of nearly USD9 billion annually due to false positive losses, in which retailers decline to make a sale because they mistakenly flag the order as fraud. NS8 provides a SaaS platform that uses behavioural analytics and real-time scoring to provide revenue protection against order fraud, advertising fraud, and poor site performance.
“Transaction and advertising fraud are an increasing burden for merchants that drain their profits and inhibit future business. Adam and his team have developed industry-leading tools that make online fraud identification and protection easy,” says Lenard Marcus, General Partner of Edison Partners who led the investment and joins the company’s board of directors. “NS8 is poised for continued momentum in the USD33 billion global fraud detection and prevention market. We’re thrilled to partner to help the company accelerate go-to-market execution and expand to even larger enterprises.”
More than 2,400 mid-market and enterprise customers in over 50 countries rely on NS8 to monitor their site traffic and shoppers’ behaviour to protect them from various types of marketing and transactional fraud. The company saw five-fold revenue growth in 2018 and a 400 per cent increase in bookings. NS8 continues to show strong growth.
“Simple fraud prevention tools do not always protect merchants from the threats they see on a regular basis, and the genesis of our platform is our low-friction approach that effectively defends merchants against the ‘big three revenue killers’: transaction fraud, advertising fraud, and site reliability issues. With their domain expertise in enterprise security and scaling growth, Edison Partners will be an immensely valuable partner to us as we look to bring new abuse, fraud and user experience products to the marketplace,” says Adam Rogas, CEO of NS8.
NS8’s flagship product, NS8 Protect, tracks over 170 different attributes and lets merchants create their own customised order rules to avoid declining real customers. NS8 Protect is available on major ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, Shopify Plus, Magento, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and thirty bees. Through direct API integrations, NS8’s extensible technology can also be implemented by enterprise businesses, including everything from large-scale ecommerce sites and platforms to payment service providers.
Edison Partners has financed and guided more than 200 private companies, a third of which have been in the enterprise solutions space. Edison’s current enterprise solutions portfolio includes All Traffic Solutions, Blue Medora, Bricata, Emplify, eSentire, ExecVision, Jornaya, Kemp, Giant Oak, Motionsoft, PathFactory, Predata, Sigstr and Terminus. Notable exits in the sector include Archive Systems, Billtrust, InSoft, Logfire, Notable Solutions, Operative, Tangoe, Telarix, Virtual Edge, and VFA. The growth equity investment in NS8 marks the eighth new investment from Edison Partners’ latest fund, Edison Partners IX.
