Memcyco raises $10M to protect businesses from brandjacking

Memcyco, a Tel Aviv-based startup that provides businesses with tools to guard against website impersonation, today announced that it has raised a $10 million seed funding. The round was led by Capri Ventures and Venture Guides.

The company provides businesses with a digital watermark that they can display on their sites to ensure visitors that they are, for example, visiting a legitimate online store, as well as back-end tools for businesses to monitor and protect their digital assets against brand impersonation in real time.

Over the course of the last few years, businesses invested heavily in identity management and security. The idea behind Memcyco, which was founded in 2021, is essentially to flip this around and tackle this issue from the consumer’s perspective.

“We say: how do I, as an end user or when I’m visiting the brand,  know that this is the real brand and not an imposter one or phishing one? Today, in order to achieve this, the only way is that you need the end user to download an agent to install something on their laptop in order to protect it in that respect. But if you are e-commerce or your bank, you cannot force your consumer to download and install something on their device — so we came up with this solution that is agentless,” explained Memcyco co-founder and COO Gideon Hazam.

Memcyco’s co-founders are all highly experienced startup founders and operators. The company’s CEO, Israel Mazin, founded security company Memco back in the 1990s, which went public and later sold to Platinum Software (which itself was later acquired by Computer Associates). Mazin’s co-founder at the time, Eli Mashiah, is now also a Memcyco co-founder and the company’s CTO. Hazam, too, worked at Memco in the 90s.

“Between all of us founders, there are many years of experience of building startups from scratch to worldwide companies — private funding public funding, partnership with strategic partners like IBM and others,” Mazin noted. “Our background is very important and now we mix our knowledge and our long experience with very young people that came from [the Israel Defense Force’s elite cybersecurity unit] 8200 and other units from the IDF.”

Most of the brands that adopt Memcyco’s solution start with its monitoring tools that allow them to discover potential brandjacking and phishing attempts. The team didn’t want to go into too many details with regard to how their service works on a technical level, but Hazam stressed that the company is taking a very proactive stance here. “We developed — and continue to develop –an AI algorithm that we can use to search for and find the scam before there is an attack,” Hazam said. “We can find them and start following after them to see if there is something that could be suspicious.”

For brands, getting started with Memcyco involves adding a few lines of code to their websites. Most start with the company’s back-end security tools, with the digital watermark being the “cherry on top,” as Hazam described it.

“Everyone knows someone who has fallen victim to a phishing-based brandjacking scam,” said Alex Pinchev, Founder and Managing Partner at Capri Ventures. “Memcyco is the first company to provide a real-time solution to that problem while existing approaches are mostly after-the-fact and leave organizations not knowing which users fell victim to the attack.”

Memcyco’s solution is already in use by several large e-commerce sites and financial institutions. The team intends to use the new funding to enhance the product, support existing customers, and expand its go-to-market organization.