Anti-transaction fraud start-up TrustEv closes successful first investment round

Just two weeks after officially launching, Irish start-up TrustEv has announced that it has secured $300,000 angel round funding from domestic and international angels, which it has earmarked for increased growth of the company.

TrustEv’s eponymous product is designed to protect online retails from transaction fraud, which is estimated to cost over $27 billion (€20 billion) each year.  TrustEv does this by verifying if buyers are who they say they are by analysing their social media accounts.

The company’s Chief Marketing Officer, Donal Cahalane describes the process;
“At its most basic level, with the permission of the user, our software looks at activity on a site like Facebook and uses simple facts like the email that you used to sign up to the site, how often you post, what you post in terms of images/videos/status updates to determine the likelihood that the content could be fraudulent content being generated by a piece of malicious software.”

The start-up currently employs six people and is in the process of growing to eight.  As part of this initial funding round the company is looking at expanding to another office in Europe.  The company’s CEO, Pat Phelan, said that the company was overwhelmed with the response to date from investors and clients.

In typically quirky style the TrustEv team have marked the funding round with the launch of a web app and competition in conjunction with Doodle Creative that’s designed to see who you talk to the most on Facebook.

The web app, Somance.me, has been designed, just in time for Valentine’s Day, to analyse users’ Facebook profiles to see who they talk to the most.  If the app finds two users that talk to each other the most then they will be entered into a draw to an all expenses paid trip to Cork, Ireland.