Israeli cybersecurity company ThetaRay, which uses mathematics to provide early detection from cyber threats, has completed a fundraising round of over $30 million, bringing the total amount raised to date to more than $60 million.
Investors include Jerusalem Venture Partners, General Electric, Bank Hapoalim, Israel's OurCrowd and SVB.
ThetaRay, which has doubled in size every year for the past five years, said on Tuesday it will use the capital to expand its presence in Europe, Asia and the United States and significantly increase its workforce to meet a growing demand for systems that fight financial crime and money laundering.
Founded in 2013, ThetaRay uses machine learning algorithms, developed by mathematicians Amir Averbuch of Tel Aviv University and Ronald Coifman of Yale, to detect system behavior anomalies and threats such as ATM hacking, insurance fraud, and SWIFT-based attacks.
The company is based in the greater Tel Aviv area, with offices in New York and Singapore, and operates mainly in the financial sector, with clients including Amsterdam-headquartered ABN AMRO Bank N.V., the Spanish Santander Group, and Citi.
ThetaRay CEO Mark Gazit the financial daily Calcalist that the technology developed by the company was recently able to discover a network of individuals who laundered money to finance Islamic State at "one of Europe's largest banks.
"It identified that tens of thousands of people made a small donation to a specific account. A regular system wouldn't have picked up on that," he said, adding that the bank passed on the report to Interpol for further investigation.
