Trustev Adds $500K From Notion Capital To Capitalise On The Ecommerce Boom

Ecommerce fraud prevention startup Trustev is on something of a roll. Having recently closed a $3 million seed round from investors including Greycroft Partners, Mangrove Capital Partners, ACT Venture Capital, Telefónica’s Wayra and Enterprise Ireland, it’s now adding to this with a $500,000 investment from enterprise-specialist VCs Notion Capital. The team behind the latter founded MessageLabs, one of the largest ever exits in the European IT security market.

Trustev’s anti-fraud and identity verification technology for e-commerce merchants is clearly sitting in a sweet spot given the billions now being spent online daily. According to research by eMarketer, global e-commerce sales are expected to reach nearly $1.3 trillion in 2013. The startup will now open an office in New York City in the first quarter of 2014.

Pat Phelan, Trustev’s co-founder and CEO says the company has just over 60 customers, including some big global carriers. However, most are reticent to be named publicly about the fact they are battling fraud, perhaps understandably. Telefonica, for instance, is known to be an investor but may or may not be a customer.

Trustev processed some 2 million customer transactions last week says Phelan, and that’s “an average”. They cover some 100 data points and the aim is to get that up to 10 million transactions by February.

Part of the funding will be to take Trustev to the next step of their business, beyond alerting around fraud and identity verification towards payment guarantee. “We will move into payment guarantee in QTR 2 where we take all the risk and allow merchants to trade globally without the fear of fraud,” says Phelan.

We wrote a fairly detailed description of the company and how it works when they were in the Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt New York.

After launching at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York last May, Trustev was named 2013’s top technology startup in Europe in a startup competition backed by the European Commission.