Israel’s Radware Acquires Indian Anti-Bot Solutions Startup ShieldSquare For USD 15-20 Million

Tel Aviv, Israel headquartered Radiant, a load balancing and cybersecurity services company, has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Bangalore-based ShieldSquare, a market-leading bot management solutions provider. The transaction is expected to close during the first quarter of 2019, subject to customary closing and regulatory conditions.

Radware provided no details about the price of the deal, but it is believed to be in the USD 15-20 million range. As of the end of the third quarter of 2018, Radware had $382 million in cash. The deal is slated for completion during the first quarter of 2019.

Founded in 2014, by five entrepreneurs – Pavan Thatha, Rakesh Thatha, Vasanth Kumar, Jyoti Kakatkar and Srikanth Konijeti, ShieldSquare is one of the pioneers in the bot mitigation industry. It is one of three recognized solution leaders by Forrester with strong differentiation on the Attack Detection, Threat Research, Reporting, and Analysis categories.

Speaking on the acquisition, Roy Zisapel, Radware CEO, said, “This acquisition allows us to expand our portfolio with robust bot management solutions that strongly fit our strategic goal to continue and deepen our integrated portfolio, organically and inorganically. Bot management can stand alone as product offerings as well as integrate into our suite of attack mitigation solutions.”

“We chose ShieldSquare because of their strong technology synergy, advanced machine learning capabilities, and the opportunity to expand Radware’s existing cloud security services. These Bot-Management services along with Radware’s Cloud WAF services offer comprehensive protection of applications. We are excited to welcome the ShieldSquare team into the Radware family.”

Four-year-old ShieldSquare has managed to raise a total of USD 350,000 in funding over four rounds since its launch in 2014. The startup lasts undisclosed amount from Endiya Partners, in October 2017 from a Series A round.

In 2014, ShieldSquare had raised INR 2 crore from angel funding backed by a pool of 15 investors, entrepreneurs and high net-worth individuals from India, Singapore, and US including FreshWork’s Girish Mathrubootham; Red-Bus founders Phanindra Sama, Charan Padmaraju, and Sudhakar Pasupunuri as well as Murugavel Janakiraman of BharatMatrimony.

In 2013, ShieldSquare was part of Microsoft Ventures Accelerator Winter Batch 2013, Bangalore and has been the nominee of Red Herring Asia 100, Nasscom Emerge 50 etc.

With this acquisition, Radware will offer ShieldSquare’s leading bot management and mitigation product under the new Radware Bot Manager product line. This new addition to Radware’s product portfolio will integrate with Radware’s leading attack mitigation solution and together, offer some of the industry’s most advanced protection from emerging and automated attacks.

“More than 50 percent of the Internet traffic today comes from bots, and while we’ve seen an increase in bot-based attacks in recent years, ‘good’ bots still play an important role in applications’ operations,” said David Aviv, Radware Chief Technology Officer. “As such, organizations need to look for bot management solutions that not only effectively detect and mitigate bot attacks, but also can accurately distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bots in real-time.”

The new solutions enhance Radware’s existing industry-leading cloud security protection to cover more crafted e-commerce attacks affecting emerging problems such as Data harvesting and Scraping Attacks; Account creation and Account Takeover Attacks; Denial of Inventory, Application DDoS & Brute Force Attacks, Brand Image / Reputation Attacks.―Inventiva