YC-Backed Smyte Launches To Fight Online Fraud
Summary
As we spend more and more of our lives on social networks and marketplaces, YC-backed Smyte is launching out of beta to make sure we don’t get defrauded, spammed, or harassed. While the Googles and Facebooks of the tech world have entire departments dedicated to preventing spam and abuse, building this infrastructure is a major pain point for smaller companies. So he joined forces with co-founders Pete Hunt — who previously built React, Facebook’s number one open source project — and ex-Instagram engineer Josh Yudaken, to create Smyte, an out-of-the-box solution for two-sided marketplaces and social networks that improves trust and safety. Smyte’s automated labeling system identifies any potentially malicious activity, based on a variety of signals and relationships, and flags it for manual review. A graduate of Y Combinator’s Winter 2015 class, Smyte has raised $2.25 million in seed funding from Harrison Metal, Baseline Ventures, Founder Collective, Upside Partnership and YC.