Ethoca Raises $45M for Collaborative E-Commerce Fraud Platform

E-commerce fraud management platform provider Ethoca has raised $45 million in investment after significant growth last year.

The minority growth equity investment was led by Spectrum Equity.

Ethoca provides a platform where e-commerce fraud decisions are made with data from both card issuers and merchants, a process designed to guard against incorrect decisions about accepting or denying transactions.

When merchants and issuers don’t share information, “the result is unnecessarily lost revenue, completely avoidable fraud losses and dissatisfied customers who are either wrongly turned away or forced to endure the inconvenient, disruptive chargeback process,” Ethoca said in a July 17 press release.

Ethoca’s first service, Ethoca Alerts, warns clients when a particular card has been involved in previous fraud or chargeback disputes. Ethoca partnered with Kount in April to blend both companies' data into the alerts service.

The funding will be used to accelerate Ethoca's global expansion. Currently more than 80,000 merchants and 30 card issuers from the U.S., Canada, Europe, Africa and the Middle East have enrolled in the service. The company more than tripled its revenue in 2014.

Throughout 2015 and into next year, Ethoca will be moving its network into Mexico, Brazil, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Southeast Asia including China, New Zealand and South Africa.

“We have long been impressed by Ethoca’s standard-setting, collaboration-based approach to tackling e-commerce fraud,” said Christopher Mitchell, managing director of Spectrum Equity, in the release. “The Ethoca team has accomplished the rare feat of creating an entirely new, global e-commerce collaboration platform outside of the traditional card networks.”