Led by Battery Ventures, the investment round will be used to continue CHEQ’s work to utilize AI and Natural Language Processing to prevent unsafe brand placements and ad fraud in real time.
Cybersecurity company CHEQ has closed $5M in Series A funding, which will help it enable digital advertisers to publish ads in a brand-safe environment and prevent ad fraud. CHEQ’s Autonomous Brand Safety solution uses military-grade AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to rapidly analyze content and users so that brands can prevent in real time having their ads served to bots or alongside negative content.
“Our goal is to provide digital advertisers with a comprehensive, ‘one-stop-shop’ solution for digital ad control that does everything automatically for ad buyers, in real time, instead of forcing them to act upon endless reporting suites after the fact. The CHEQ platform hermetically and proactively protects advertisers from having their ads placed within negatively associated content; being displayed to fake users; or going through a long line of ad-tech arbitrage players. Advertisers can set up ad-placement guidelines to ensure their viewability standards are being met, and most important, provide them with unparalleled transparency as to exactly why an ad was not displayed, whether due to fraud, topical associations, URLs of non-brand safe pages, etc.”
– Guy Tytunovich, CHEQ’s CEO
CHEQ’s fully automated plug-and-play prevention solution, developed by a team of military cyber technologists, guarantees the utmost safety and quality for brands, agencies and publishers involved with digital and video ad placements. Instead of focusing primarily on generating multiple reports which generate more work after the damage has been done, CHEQ’s solution brings never-before-realized brand safety solutions and technology to the market to eliminate fake ad impressions while blocking fraudulent activity in real-time.
Ehud Levy, CHEQ’s Chairman of the Board, added: “We’re pleased to have the support of this impressive investor group. It’s a testament to the innovative platform we’ve built. This round will help us grow and improve CHEQ’s technology while expanding our presence and reach.”
Battery Ventures, a global, technology-focused investment firm, chose to invest in CHEQ for its advanced cybersecurity technology, automated solutions at scale based on artificial intelligence, and its ability to look at hundreds of data fragments, then analyze and act upon them in real time.
According to Itzik Parnafes, a Battery general partner who is joining the CHEQ board: “CHEQ is an extremely exciting player in brand-safety today, with innovative technology that we feel could make ‘traditional’ ad-verification obsolete.”
About CHEQ
CHEQ is a global cybersecurity company and a pioneer of Autonomous Brand Safety, protecting the digital ad spend for the world’s leading brands. With offices in Tokyo, New York and Tel Aviv, the company’s mission is to help sustain the digital ecosystem by protecting advertisers from the risks of online advertising and helping them regain confidence in the space. At a time where the world’s largest advertisers are excluding premium news and UGC publishers from their media plans, CHEQ aims to enable advertisers to resume buying in environments they deem risky, while eliminating the need of bill deductions, loss of media scale, and tiring, report-based optimizations.
About Battery
Battery strives to invest in cutting-edge, category-defining businesses in markets including software and services, web infrastructure, consumer internet, mobile and industrial technologies. Founded in 1983, the firm backs companies at stages ranging from seed to private equity and invests globally from offices in Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, London and Israel. Follow the firm on Twitter @BatteryVentures, visit our website at http://www.battery.com.