Venture capitalTrustev closes $3 million seed funding round

Dublin, Ireland-based startup Trustev has announced the closing of a $3 million seed funding round to finance the further development of its e-commerce security and online fraud protection technology. Participants include U.S. venture capital fund Greycroft Partners, Mangrove Capital Partners, ACT Venture Capital, Telefónica’s Wayra, and Enterprise Ireland.

Trustev’s anti-fraud solution was launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City in May, and since then has been adopted by thirty-five e-commerce companies around the world, who use it on their Web sites to verify customers’ identities. The company also won the European Commission’s Tech All-Star Award. The award is given after a an EU-wide competition among young technology startups.

The company says that $3 million seed round will finance its accelerated expansion to the United States, where the company will soon open an office in New York City, as well as the further development of Trustev’s anti-fraud and payment protection solutions for e-commerce.

“We’re thrilled to have such a strong pedigree of investors who believe in our technology and its proven ability to fight e-commerce fraud,” said Trustev co-founder and CEO Pat Phelan. 

“In addition to saving tens of millions of dollars through robust fraud prevention, Trustev also helps online merchants increase overseas opportunities by removing the danger of selling across international borders. Our focus is on pushing the complexity of fraud into the background, allowing online retailers to concentrate on servicing their honest customers while we identify and eliminate the troublemakers.”

According to research by eMarketer, global e-commerce sales are expected to reach nearly $1.3 trillion in 2013, making online fraud prevention an urgent requirement for merchants. Trustev addresses this requirement by using multiple dynamic data sources to independently verify a user’s identity on e-commerce sites. The company says its solution guarantees online merchants that they are dealing with actual customers, not fraudsters. Trustev’s passive authentication technologies work in the background, confirming and securing the transaction, while its active authentication technologies work to confirm the user’s identity before the purchase is complete.

“Trustev is solving the three biggest issues that stand in the way of the e-commerce industry’s growth: limiting manual review of card-not-present transactions, bringing online fraud rates down to the equivalent of other channels, and empowering retailers to accept international payments,” said Ian Sigalow, partner and co-founder at Greycroft Partners. “We expect e-commerce to reach parity with physical retail sales over the next two decades — that is a trillion dollar shift in consumer behavior in the US, and much more globally — and Trustev is an essential part of this growth. ”

Announcing the funding on-stage at the Web Summit in Dublin, Phelan further disclosed that by the end of 2013, Trustev will be processing ten million transactions per week for e-commerce companies.