Forter

Shared roots: Fraud Sciences and PayPal

Forter was founded in Tel Aviv in 2013 by Michael Reitblat, Liron Damri and Alon Shemesh. All three had previously worked as software engineers at the Israeli company Fraud Sciences, which PayPal bought in 2008. This shared background also explains their approach: all of them had seen up close how much data it takes to make the right call on a single transaction.

The network advantage: the core idea

A single merchant sees a given shopper once, and has no way of knowing whether this is a long-time customer of other stores or an identity created five minutes ago. A platform that serves thousands of merchants sees the same identity again and again across different sites, so it can tell a legitimate shopper from an attacker trying out a new identity. The more merchants join, the better the decisions get for everyone. According to English Wikipedia, the company holds a dataset of more than 1.5 billion online identities.

How the decision is actually made

The decision is made automatically in real time, with no manual review. It combines identity verification, checkout optimization and fraud prevention in one system. In 2023, Forter bought the Israeli startup Immue, which specialized in bot detection.

Series F, according to Michael Reitblat's own company blog post

On 24 May 2021, Michael Reitblat, CEO and co-founder of Forter, announced on the company's official blog that it had raised $300 million in a Series F round led by Tiger Global Management, at a valuation of $3 billion. In his words, this made it the most valuable private company in the fraud prevention industry. According to the same post, in the 12 months before the round Forter doubled its revenue, doubled the size of its global merchant network, and passed $250 billion in annual online transaction volume. Forter's total funding over the years is estimated at $525 million, from investors that also include Sequoia Capital, NEA and Salesforce Ventures.

Forter vs. Riskified

Forter and Riskified are two Israeli companies that together defined an entire niche in online payments, but their models differ. Riskified makes a financial guarantee on every decision, while Forter emphasizes the network advantage and the combination of identity verification with optimization of the checkout process itself. Both were active long before the term "generative AI" entered public conversation.