Doppel raises $35M for its social engineering detection platform – News

Cybersecurity startup Doppel Inc. today disclosed that it has closed a $35 million funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

The venture capital firm was joined by 9Yards Capital, Sozo Ventures and several returning backers. The Series B raise closed at a $205 million valuation.

“We’ll use these funds to double down on our core products, serve the rapidly growing demand from enterprises across all sectors, and build the first social engineering defense platform,” said Doppel Chief Executive Officer Kevin Tian.

Phishing emails are usually disguised to look as if they were sent by a legitimate company. Other types of hacking campaigns sometimes employ similar methods. A malicious shopping app, for example, might attempt to impersonate a popular retail brand. Doppel provides a platform that helps companies detect when a hacker impersonates them and take down the infrastructure being used to do so.

In addition to phishing emails and lookalike apps, Doppel spots social engineering campaigns that unfold on e-commerce platforms. Its platform can detect attempts to sell counterfeit goods under a legitimate company’s brand. Doppel likewise spots online ads that impersonate established brands to trick users into clicking them.

Another set of features spots phishing links designed to resemble a legitimate company’s website URL. According to Doppel, it spots malicious links with the help of honeypots. A honeypot is a system that draws cyberattacks with the goal of collecting technical data about them. 

In some cases, phishing emails are noticed by the users they target earlier than by the automated systems that companies deploy to spot such threats. Doppel provides a tool that enables customers to notify a company when they receive a phishing email that impersonates its brand. A second tool, Employee AbuseBox, allows enterprises to provide similar phishing reporting features for their workers.

When users report a malicious email, Doppel analyzes its contents along with any links and attachments it may include. The company uses this information to track down the infrastructure that powers the phishing campaign. From there, Doppel sends takedown requests to the companies that host the infrastructure.

The software maker says that its platform doubles as a dark web monitoring tool. Using Doppel, a company can monitor hacker websites for information about malicious activity that targets its infrastructure. The software can also spot data theft attempts that target an organization’s executives.

Under the hood, Doppel detects malicious activity by analyzing about 100 million security data points per day. It processes the data using large language models from OpenAI. The company says that the median amount of time it takes customers to take down social engineering campaigns detected by its platform is about ten hours.

Doppel’s latest funding round comes 15 months after its Series A raise. According to the company, its annual recurring revenue has tripled since thanks to a combination of new customer acquisition and increased spending on the part of existing users.

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