Opendoor, a four year-old, San Francisco-based company, has from the outset intended to make it possible to buy and sell residential real estate with a few key strokes. It seemingly gets closer to that audacious vision by the day. The company closed on $325 million in new funding in June in a round that brought its total equity funding to $645 million to date — and its valuation to more than $2 billion. The company has also raised $1.75 million in debt, and two sources tell us more funding from SoftBank is imminent.

Opendoor’s cofounder and CEO, Eric Wu, who previously cofounded two other companies, won’t answer questions about SoftBank when asked. But there’s no question the company is one of the most capital-intensive startups on the scene currently. Opendoor bids on homes sight unseen, agrees to buy them, then — contingent on an inspection to verify the quality of the home (“sometimes customers aren’t aware of things like foundation issues,” explains Wu) — it sells them, charging a fee of “about 6 percent,” he says. (Recent reports claim this number can reach as high as 13 percent.)

To date, the company has largely been working with people who need to sell their homes quickly because of a new job or other life event. By using Opendoor, goes the pitch, they don’t get stuck paying for two mortgages when they can’t afford it. Yet Opendoor increasingly wants to help them buy that next house, too. Toward that end, the company has just acquired Open Listings, a four-year-old, L.A.-based startup that has aimed to make it easier and cheaper for buyers to purchase homes by automating much of what an agent would do, thus reducing the fee an agent would traditionally take.

Opendoor isn’t saying what it’s paying for Open Listings, which had raised $7.6 million from investors over the years, including Y Combinator, Matrix Partners, Arena Ventures, and Initialized Capital. But all of Open Listings’ 45 employees will join the 900 employees of Opendoor. The move also gets Opendoor into a handful of new cities in which it wasn’t already operating, including San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, L.A., and Chicago.

The deal was also a very natural fit, suggests Wu. He says he met Open Listings cofounder and CEO  Judd Schoenholtz in 2015, when Schoenholtz — through YC’s alumni network — approached Wu, whose last company had passed through YC’s program. Schoenholtz “reached out and wanted to share what they were trying to solve in real estate, so we met up and talked about problems we saw and our respective approaches . . . Judd was starting with the buyer side, and we were starting with the sales side, and we continued to share notes on how we were solving both.”

The acquisition is very first for Opendoor, though one senses it’s just the beginning of similar tie-ups. In a call yesterday, Wu referred to other initiatives that Opendoors is exploring, if not ready to discuss in great detail yet publicly, including a kind of financing business, which Wu has been talking about for years but that sounds closer now to fruition. “We’re doing some things around mortgages that will integrated into the shopping experience,” says Wu, without wanting to elaborate further. Home improvement loans may also be on the horizon. (Wu says Opendoor “also wants to enable home buyers to personalize their experience.”)

Opendoor is also working more closely with developers, forming partnerships with “19 of the 25 largest home builders in the country over the last 18 months,” says Wu. The idea is for Opendoor’s customers to put down a deposit on a new home, with Opendoor operating quietly in the background to to both help choose a closing date, as well as to sell those customers’ previous homes.

The big question, as always, is what Opendoor does in a sustained market downturn. The company is reportedly on pace to spend more than $2.5 billion on home purchases over the next year. Yet buying homes is a complicated affair. After Opendoor acquires each home, it has to ensure the home is up to code in order to resell it. Indeed, though the company is willing to buy homes built after 1960, Wu says a growing amount of its inventory was built no earlier than 1990.

More, hanging on to its inventory, which Opendoor does for 90 days on average, would seem to pose a major risk, particularly given that the housing market is highly sensitive to interest rates and other macroeconomic factors that could prompt a market cool-off. We may even be seeing early signs of one right now.

Wu doesn’t seem concerned, focused as he is on creating a kind of virtuous cycle of home buying. Asked about housing market slowdowns, he shrugs off the question. Maybe he needs to operate that way, given the ambitious vision of Opendoor.

Says Wu when talk turns to rising mortgage rates and growing new home inventory, “We have a world-class pricing team to track data on a national and subdivision level that informs [what we do].” As for the condition of the housing market, “we aren’t commenting,” he says.

Pictured above, left to right: Eric Wu and Judd Schoenholtz.

In a world where large hyperscale companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google dominate the public cloud, it would seem foolhardy for a startup to try and carve out a space, but Packet has an alternative customized cloud vision, and investors have taken notice. Today, the company announced a $30 million Series B led by Third Point Ventures.

An interesting mix of strategic and traditional investors joined the round including Battery Ventures, JA Mitsui Leasing and Samsung Next. Existing investors SoftBank Corp. and Dell Technologies Capital also participated. The company has now raised over $40 million.

The company also showed some signs of maturing by bringing in Ihab Tarazi as CTO and George Karidis as COO. Tarazi, who came over from Equinix, likes what he sees in Packet .

He says they offer several advantages over the public providers. First of all, customers can buy whatever hardware they want. “We offer the most diverse hardware options,” he said. That means they could get servers equipped with Intel, ARM, AMD or with specific nVidia GPUs in whatever configurations they want. By contrast public cloud providers tend to offer a more off-the-shelf approach. It’s cheap and abundant, but you have to take what they offer, and that doesn’t always work for every customer.

Another advantage Packet bring to the table, according to Tarazi, is that they support a range of open source software options, letting customers build whatever applications they want on top of that custom hardware.

They currently have 18 locations around the world, but Tarazi said they will soon be adding 50 more, also adding geographic diversity to the mix.

Finally, each customer gets their own bare metal offering, providing them with a single tenant private option inside Packet’s data center. This gives them the advantages of a privately run data center but where Packet handles all of the management, configuration and upkeep.

Tarazi doesn’t see Packet competing directly with the hyperscale players. Instead, he believes there will be room for both approaches. “I think you have a combination of both happening where people are trying to take advantage of all these hardware options to optimize performance across specific applications,” he explained.

The company, which launched in 2014, currently has about 50 employees with headquarters in New York City and offices in Palo Alto. They are also planning on opening an operations center in Dallas soon. The number should swell to 100 employees over the next year as they expand operations.

Last month Tesla introduced a limited edition smartphone charger. Even though it was overpriced and slow, the charger quickly sold out. Now Tesla says the charger will soon be available again and at a lower price.

The charger features 6,000mAh of juice and 5W of wireless output charging and 7.5W through USB. The first time around, the charger was $65 but now it will cost $50. Still, as The Verge points out even at the lower cost, similar wireless chargers can be had for less money and often sport a larger battery. But they don’t say Tesla.

This charger is the latest in Tesla’s small electronic lifestyle items. They’ve long sold USB chargers designed to mimic the design and appeal of its Supercharger line. This latest version looks like the Tesla Powerwall battery — but as awesome as the Powerwall is, it cannot wireless charge a smartphone.

@verge tipline @nickstatt check out the cut in cost and refunds for Tesla's phone charger. Still not an Anker, but pretty sweet move pic.twitter.com/n9WG6xHPIs

— Jᴀʀᴇᴅ Hᴀssᴏɴ (@JaredEzz) September 10, 2018

Juul Labs has filed trademark claims against 30 entities in China for selling counterfeit Juul products on eBay. The complaint was filed in late August, and today the company announced that the Federal Court in the Eastern District of Virginia has granted a temporary restraining order and frozen the PayPal accounts of the entities selling counterfeit Juul devices and products.

The Juul e-cig has grown in popularity at a rapid clip since 2015, currently owning more than 70 percent of the market based on revenue. Most obviously, that growth has come along with regulatory hurdles from the FDA, including an investigation launched in April around underage use.

But just like any other growing startup, Juul Labs is also dealing with copycats.

On the one hand, Juul says these counterfeit e-cigs and pods were not quality tested the same way as Juul, posing a safety threat to those that purchased. On the other, these products circumvented the age verification process which Juul uses (21+ on its own website), according to the company.

Age verification is particularly important to Juul right now. The company has built out a rather impressive distribution network with vape shops, convenience stores, and other shops, which has been lucrative for growth. However, it has forced the startup to sacrifice some level of control over who can purchase the product.

In April, the FDA launched an investigation into why Juul products have drawn teenagers and minors as customers, asking Juul to turn over all documents related to “product marketing; research on the health, toxicological, behavioral or physiologic effects of the products, including youth initiation and use; whether certain product design features, ingredients or specifications appeal to different age groups; and youth-related adverse events and consumer complaints associated with the products.”

The FDA is also cracking down on some e-commerce platforms, with Juul and regulators working to take down illegal sales of the Juul product on Amazon and eBay. Thus far, the company has worked to remove more than 16,000 listings from online marketplaces since January, attempting to limit sales to only verified and authorized dealers.

This may seem like a side battle in Juul’s greater war, but they’re really one in the same. Juul’s brand perception is nearly as important as the quality of the product itself. Can the company find a way to retake control of its own distribution, whether through a new smartphone-connected device that verifies age and intake or through other means?

That question is only further muddled by the fact that counterfeit products are floating around the market and, according to Juul Labs, potentially putting the public at risk, all under the Juul brand name.

So why has Juul decided to file a complaint now?

“The prevalence of counterfeiters has increased dramatically over the last year consistent with JUUL’s rise in the marketplace,” Gerald Masoudi, Chief Legal Officer at JUUL Labs told TechCrunch. “The process of tracking and identifying the culprits of counterfeit products is time intensive. We have dedicated additional resources to this initiative to ensure these products stay off the market and out of hands of underage users.”

Masoudi added that the best way for customers to know that there Juul is the real deal is to either buy through the website or check that the store they’re visiting is listed on the Juul website as a verified seller.

You can read the full complaint below:

TechCrunch will soon hold it’s first ever Startup Battlefield MENA competition dedicated to the MENA region, in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 3rd. The event will showcase the launch of 15 of the hottest startups in MENA on stage for the first time. We’ll also be joined by some of the leading investments firms in MENA. If you want to be in the same room, you’d better grab your tickets now.

Here, we showcase just some of the investors sending key partners to the event:

Outlierz Ventures

Outlierz Ventures, is a seed investment fund, based out of Morocco, providing smart capital to African tech enabled startups.

Founded in 2017, the fund invests in tech enabled companies solving a real problem in a key sector with an innovative approach and a scalable business model (fintech, insurtech, agritech, healthtech, B2B marketplaces, logistics, etc).

The firm sees “tremendous opportunities at the intersection of tech, entrepreneurship and African economies” and says “there is talent but not enough money and appropriate resources to grow scalable startups from these emerging ecosystems.” That’s why it’s endeavoring to change this and enable entrepreneurs to grow successful businesses from Africa to the World.

Some of its key investments so far include Sokowatch, WaystoCap and Asoko Insight.

BeryTech Fund

Berytech Fund II is a 51 million US Dollar Beirut-based Venture Capital Fund. Funds were received from major banks in Lebanon under the Circular 331 issued by the Lebanon Central Bank, an initiative that has played a significant role in the activation of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Lebanon. This fund comes following the extensive support provided by Berytech in the building, promotion and management of an ecosystem for start-ups and growing companies over the past 15 years.

Berytech aims to turn innovative ideas into successful businesses, supporting and stimulating entrepreneurship, through incubation, business support & development, hosting in high-tech infrastructure, funding solutions, coaching, networking, training and mentoring.

In the last year it’s participated in funding rounds for: Cherpa, scriptr.io and BSynchro anong others.

Leap Ventures

Leap Ventures is a tech-focused entrepreneur-led venture capital firm that operates in MENA and Europe. Leaps founders have over 20 years each of entrepreneurial experience under their belts. As a result, discussions and collaborations are put in an entrepreneur-to-entrepreneur context.

The Lebanese-centric team based out of the Beirut Digital District (BDD), also with an office in Dubai, consists of four partners, each with a wealth of experience. Founder Henri Asseily himself is the founder of Shopzilla / Bizrate, exited for $569 million, along with Hala Fadel who is the chair of the MIT Enterprise Forum for the Pan Arab Region, as well as being a telecoms business entrepreneurs and the founder of Beirut’s space Coworking+961.

The fund seeks investments that range between $5 million and $10 million per company. So, Lebanese companies at growth stage and Series B are on the agenda.

Portfolio companies include Keeward, Energy24, HedgeGuard, Kirontech, Sqwirl Lab, NAR, MyKi, InMobiles, U-Turn, Pandacraft, Dejbox, ConnectAgri, KEAKR, SnapEvent, Troy Dimension and Brigad.

Endure Capital

Endure Capital is an early stage investment VC firm headed by entrepreneurs. Endure prides itself on being founder-focused. It believes in the people behind the idea, and works with them through challenges, hurdles and objectives.

Is recent investments include Mawdoo3, FORASNA, BasharSoft, Wuzzuf, Shezlong, Nawah Scientific, Sourceress, Fat Llama and Aspect Biosystems.

Graphene VC

Graphene Ventures is a venture capital firm that focuses on early and growth stage tech companies in enterprise software,consumer technology, health tech, fintech and blockchain technologies

Its investments include WakeCap Technologies, b8ta, Everledger, Lyft, Jiobit and Zum.

Flat6Labs

Flat6Labs is Sawari Ventures’ dedicated startup accelerator for seed stage investments. Launched in Cairo in 2011, it assists and encourages entrepreneurs throughout the critical first steps of development. Every four months, it funds and mentors a number of carefully selected start-ups from Egypt and the MENA region, providing them with seed capital and physical hosting at its premises. In addition, it offers interaction-based mentorship and educational experiences, organized in conjunction with the American University in Cairo.

Flat6Labs’ philosophy is centered on immersing entrepreneurs into the real-world challenges of creating and managing successful enterprises in an open, collaborative and value-added environment. In May 2012, Flat6Labs joined the Global Accelerator Network (GAN), as the first member from Africa.

Some of its recent investments include WNNA, Nural, Chefaa, Tombeely, MedMisr, Elkrem, Vynd, Dabchy, Harmonica and Crowdsway.

Silicon Badia

Silicon Badia is a venture capital firm investing in technology companies globally.

Silicon Badia participates in seed rounds, injecting anywhere between $50,000 and $500,000. Since its launch in 2012, it has invested in 31 U.S. startups, and is looking to raise more money. It also manages Badia Impact Fund, which invests in Arab startups. Investors include the European Investment Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Cisco and the King Abdullah II Fund for Development. To date, it has a portfolio of 12 startups, including weather forecaster ArabiaWeather, e-commerce website ShopGo, and restaurant reservation portal Reserveout. Investments range from $500,000 to $4 million.

Its recent investment include Forever Labs, Swvl, rOcean, Brace, liwwa, Super Dispatch, Bayzat, Novo, Plot and Forever Labs.

VentureSouq

Headquartered in Dubai with a team in Saudi Arabia, VentureSouq operates a large co-investment platform with a global investment portfolio. Its portfolio includes companies such as Fetchr, Souqalmal and Reddit, among others.

Other investments include Substack, Telfaz11, Mighty Buildings (YC W18), Frontier Car Group, HelloVerify, Edwin, BioCarbon Engineering, TODAQ and Proven Skincare.

GET YOUR TICKETS

Tickets to this event — our first in this part of the world — cost $29 (including VAT), and you can buy your tickets right here.

Startup Battlefield consists of three preliminary rounds with 15 teams — five startups per round — who have only six minutes to pitch and present a live demo to a panel of expert technologists and VC investors. After each pitch, the judges have six minutes to grill the team with tough questions. This is all after the free pitch-coaching they receive from TechCrunch editors.

One startup will emerge the winner of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018 — and receive a US$25,000 no-equity cash prize and win a trip for two to compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time).

Joining us on stage will be the following speakers, drawn from many of the key founders and investors in the region. Here are the speakers so far for TechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018 and there are more to come!

Google’s lawyers are in Europe’s top court today arguing against applying the region’s so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling globally domains, rather only geo-limiting delistings to European sub-domains (as it does now).

The original rtbf ruling was also a European Court of Justice (ECJ) decision.

Back in 2014 the court ruled search engines must respect Europeans’ privacy rights, and — on request — remove erroneous, irrelevant and/or outdated information about a private citizen.

Google was not at all happy with the judgement, and kicked off a major lobbying effort against it — enlisting help from free speech champions like Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales.

But it also complied with the ruling, after a fashion (after all, it is EU law) — applying delistings on local domains but not across Google.com. Which means there’s a trivial workaround for circumventing EU law.

That has displeased European data protection agencies — who say Google is flouting the law and EU citizens fundamental rights are not being respected. France’s data protection agency challenged Google’s approach. In May 2016 it ordered the company to make delistings global, and fined it €100,000 for non-compliance.

Google appealed and last year the French court decided to refer questions to the ECJ for a ruling on the scope of the delisting — saying it “poses a serious difficulty in interpreting the Law of the European Union”.

And so now we’re back in Europe’s top court with Google’s lawyers arguing against making delistings global — contending it would damage free speech, and enable authoritarian regimes to get stuff they don’t like scrubbed off the Internet.

“We — and a wide range of human rights and media organizations, and others, like Wikimedia — believe that this runs contrary to the basic principles of international law: No one country should be able to impose its rules on the citizens of another country, especially when it comes to linking to lawful content,” wrote Google’s Kent Walker, in 2015. “Adopting such a rule would encourage other countries, including less democratic regimes, to try to impose their values on citizens in the rest of the world.”

The extraterritoriality problem was also chewed over by Google’s self-appointed ‘advisory council’ on the rtbf issue at that time.

And while the majority of this Google-appointed body aligned with Google’s view that there should not be global delistings, there was one dissenting voice: German MP, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who wrote then:  “The internet is global, the protection of the user’s rights must also be global. Any circumvention of these rights must be prevented.”

Google and CNIL declined to comment on today’s hearing.

A second (separate) rtbf case also being heard by the ECJ today concerns whether search engines should have to remove reference to any sensitive personal information about individuals. Which would represent a significant expansion if granted.

However the case is not supported by EU data protection agencies. The individuals bringing the case had their application rejected by CNIL, leading them to pursue a legal appeal.

The key point on this case is that the current right to delist is not absolute; the rtbf only applies to private individuals, not to public figures (e.g. politicians and journalists); and also only applies where the information in question is outdated or irrelevant. So it is bounded and balanced, and absolutely does not apply to every individual and every piece of sensitive personal data.

The current implementation of the rtbf also means Google must review requests, to balance the public right to know against individual privacy rights.

The company actually denies the majority of requests — i.e. when it does not believe a request falls under the scope of the law (Google publishes a Transparency Report on delisting, showing it has, to-date, agreed to delist less than half of requests).

Individuals denied delisting can appeal to a national data protection agency, and indeed challenge a DPA decision in court — as in this case.

But Google’s lawyers said today that only a tiny fraction of rtbf request decisions are every appealed, and further claimed its decisions largely align with DPAs… 

There’s no fixed timeline for the ECJ to hand down a ruling on the two cases but a spokeswoman for the court told us that on average the opinion of the Advocate General comes 2 to 4 months after the hearing, and the Court’s judgment around 3 to 6 months after that. So a court verdict does not look likely before 2019.

Since the 2014 judgement, the EU has doubled down on the rtbf — extending the principle by baking it into its recently updated data protection framework, the GDPR, which gives EU citizens rights to ask data controllers to rectify or delete their personal information, for example.

Alibaba is doubling down on Russia after the Chinese e-commerce giant launched a joint venture with one of the country’s leading internet companies.

Russia is said to have over 70 million internet users, around half of its population, with countless more attracted from Russian-speaking neighboring countries. The numbers are projected to rise as, like in many parts of the world, the growth of smartphones brings more people online. Now Alibaba is moving in to ensure it is well placed to take advantage.

Mail.ru, the Russia firm that offers a range of internet services including social media, email and food delivery to 100 million registered users, has teamed up with Alibaba to launch AliExpress Russia, a JV that they hope will function as a “one-stop destination” for communication, social media, shopping and games. Mail.ru backer MegaFon, a telecom firm, and the country’s sovereign wealth fund RDIF (Russian Direct Investment Fund) have also invested undisclosed amounts into the newly-formed organization.

To recap: Alibaba — which launched its AliExpress service in Russia some years ago — will hold 48 percent of the business, with 24 percent for MegaFon, 15 percent for Mail.ru and the remaining 13 percent take by RDIF. In addition, MegaFon has agreed to trade its 10 percent stake in Mail.ru to Alibaba in a transaction that (alone) is likely to be worth north of $500 million.

That figure doesn’t include other investments in the venture.

“The parties will inject capital, strategic assets, leadership, resources and expertise into a joint venture that leverages AliExpress’ existing businesses in Russia,” Alibaba explained on its Alizila blog.

The strategy, it seems, is to pair Mail.ru’s consumer services with AliExpress, Alibaba’s international e-commerce marketplace. That’ll allow Russian consumers to buy from AliExpress merchants in China, but also overseas markets like Southeast Asia, India, Turkey (where Alibaba recently backed an e-commerce firm) and other parts of Europe where it has a presence. Likewise, Russian online sellers will gain access to consumers in those markets. Alibaba’s ‘branded mall’ — TMall — is also a part of the AliExpress Russia offering.

This deal suggests that Alibaba has picked its ‘horse’ in Russia’s internet race, much the same way that it has repeatedly backed Paytm — the company offering payments, e-commerce and digital banking — in India with funding and integrations.

Already, Alibaba said that Russia has been a “vital market for the growth” for its Alipay mobile payment service. It didn’t provide any raw figures to back that up, but you can bet that it will be pushing Alipay hard as it runs AliExpress Russia, alongside Mail.ru’s own offering, which is called Money.Mail.Ru.

“Most Russian consumers are already our users, and this partnership will enable us to significantly increase the access to various segments of the e-commerce offering, including both cross-border and local merchants. The combination of our ecosystems allows us to leverage our distribution through our merchant base and goods as well as product integrations,” said Mail.Ru Group CEO Boris Dobrodeev in a statement.

This is the second strategic alliance that MegaFon has struck this year. It formed a joint venture with Gazprombank in May through a deal that saw it offload five percent of its stake in Mail.ru. MegaFon acquired 15.2 percent of Mail.ru for $740 million in February 2017.

The Russia deal comes a day after Alibaba co-founder and executive chairman Jack Ma — the public face of the company — announced plans to step down over the next year. Current CEO Daniel Zhang will replace him as chairman, meaning that the company will also need to appoint a new CEO.

A security firm says credit card skimming malware installed by hackers on British Airways’ website a few months ago was to blame for a data breach of over 380,000 credit cards.

Payments through the airline’s website and mobile app were stolen over the three week period, but a key clue was that travel information wasn’t affected.

Yonathan Klijnsma, a threat researcher at RiskIQ, suspected it might be the same group that was behind the Ticketmaster breach, in which hackers targeted a third-party that loaded code on Ticketmaster’s various sites. From there, it could siphon off thousands of transactions.

This time, Klijnsma said the group took an even more “highly targeted approach,” describing a wave of attacks that the “Magecart” collective has used to steal thousands of records from various sites in recent months.

“This British Airways attack was just an extension of this campaign,” he said, prior to the release of his research.

His research, out Tuesday, points to hackers injecting code directly onto the company’s website which the airline used shared on both the website and the mobile app. Using his company’s proprietary web crawling technology, he found that code hosted on the airline’s global site was compromised on August 21 — the reported date of the breach — and malicious code was injected without anyone noticing.

When a customer clicked bought plane tickets, the code would scrape the credit card information the open payment page and forward the data to a fake site run by the hackers from a private server in Romania.

Names, billing address, email address, and all bank card details were collected by the code.

“This attack is a simple but highly targeted approach compared to what we’ve seen in the past with the Magecart skimmer which grabbed forms indiscriminately,” said Klijnsma. “This particular skimmer is very much attuned to how British Airway’s payment page is set up, which tells us that the attackers carefully considered how to target this site instead of blindly injecting the regular Magecart skimmer.”

That would explain why the financial data was collected but not the travel and passport data. It also explains why the mobile app was affected, Klijnsma said, because an analysis of the mobile app also loaded the same data-scraping script.

“There’s so many ways they could have stolen the payment or [personal] information, they went for this really simple method, but its super effective,” said Klijnsma.

But, he said, “they went from super advanced to simplifying their attacks — and their [returns are] more insane than ever.”

British Airways spokesperson Liza Ravenscroft declined to comment citing an ongoing criminal investigation.

Ravelin, the London-based company using machine learning to help e-commerce companies fight and predict the risk of fraud, has raised £8 million in Series B funding. The round is led by BlackFin Capital Partners, while existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, Passion Capital, and Playfair Capital followed on.

In a call with co-founder and CEO Martin Sweeney, he told me the new funding will in part be used for Ravelin’s expansion plans. This will include opening an office in the East Coast of the U.S., where the company is seeing increasing in-bound inquiries. This, he says, won’t merely be one or two sales people, but will be staffed properly, including posting one of Ravelin’s other co-founders there.

The company has also recently developed a product for Payment Service Providers, and says it will continue to invest in other capabilities complementary to its core proposition of charge back protection. These will include account security and risk prediction.

Launched in 2016, Ravelin has developed machine learning-based technology that helps online merchants and their payment service providers reduce losses to fraud and improve acceptance rates of orders. The idea is to do away with cruder, rule-based systems and use machine learning to negate false positives and give merchants more confidence accepting customers/transactions.

More broadly, Ravelin wants to be an invaluable tool in fighting chargebacks, account takeovers, organised fraud rings and terms of service abuse, which the company says it continues to be a multi-billion dollar problem for the online commerce ind

Sweeney tells me the future aim is to be able to identify different patterns of risk to personalise the customer journey accordingly. For example, a more riskier transaction may introduce greater friction in the checkout process as more security hurdles are introduced. Likewise, a less risky customer could encounter fewer steps, helping to increase conversions.

To that end, in the last year businesses such as eShopWorld, Just Eat, Kinguin, and Quiqup have joined Ravelin’s existing enterprise clients. “There is no greater endorsement of our approach than the companies we’ve been able to add to our portfolio,” adds Sweeney in a statement. “We’re proud that many of the world’s leading online businesses have chosen to work with us. We’ll continue to serve them well”.