SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 16, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Smyte has won the Visa Developer Platform API Challenge, a competition created by Visa as part of its Everywhere Initiative. The competition, which had 600 entrants, invited startups to participate in three categories: IoT, Developer Platform API and Event Commerce Experience. Smyte was awarded $25,000 for winning the API Challenge.
Visa’s Everywhere Initiative was created in 2015 to drive strong business outcomes by harnessing the creativity and talent within the startup community. The Developer Platform API Challenge asked participants to propose solutions to use Visa APIs for more meaningful commerce or finance-related experiences for customers. In response, Smyte explored an integration with Visa’s CyberSource Payments API that would include new advanced anti-fraud and security capabilities for cardholders, such as detecting and preventing two-sided marketplace fraud (fake inventory, buyer-seller collusion), spam, harassment and compromised accounts.
Smyte was founded in 2014 by security and IT infrastructure engineers from Facebook, Google and Instagram. The company’s trust and safety SaaS platform, which launched in 2015, is now used by top peer-to-peer marketplaces and social networks including GoFundMe, Indiegogo, TaskRabbit and Quora to prevent spam, scams, harassment and fraud. The platform analyzes over five billion online actions every month using a variety of techniques, such as manual heuristics, machine learning and deep learning, making it harder for internet mischief-makers to disrupt online businesses.
“Visa is one of the world’s payments innovation companies and a powerful brand worldwide,” says Pete Hunt, CEO of Smyte. “Winning an award of this nature is phenomenal and being selected is a testament to the challenges companies face in protecting consumers from fraud, spam and harassment online. Our mission is to provide companies with the tools and technologies they need to deliver safer and more secure online customer experiences.”
About Smyte
Smyte is an online security startup based in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 2014 by former Facebook, Google and Instagram security and infrastructure engineers. Its trust and safety platform is used by many of the leading peer-to-peer marketplaces and social apps to combat spam, scam, online harassment and credit card fraud. Smyte is a graduate of the Y Combinator Winter 2015 program. More info at www.smyte.com.
CONTACT: Media contact: Kevin Wolf TGPR (650) 327-1641 [email protected]