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Distil.it Closes $1.8 Million Series-Seed Investment Led by ff Venture CapitalARLINGTON, Va., Jan 24, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE via COMTEX) -- Distil.it, the first cloud-based, intelligent gatekeeper for website content protection, announced today that it has secured $1.8 million in series-seed funding. The round was led by ff Venture Capital with participation from Correlation Ventures, Idea Fund Partners, CIT, Piedmont RIA, Cloud Power Fund, and TechStars. Distil offers a premium, cloud-based enterprise service that protects website content from scraping and malicious bots while accelerating website performance using their global network. Since completing the inaugural TechStars Cloud class in early 2012, the company has rapidly grown its customer base across some of tech's most lucrative online verticals including social media, e-commerce, travel, digital publishing, and directories. "Companies don't realize that their websites are being attacked everyday. That they are losing money and sensitive information to web scraping and bot attacks," says John Frankel, Partner at ff VC, who joins Distil's board. "Distil.it has proven with top companies, such as cult of mac, that their product can effectively block these attacks, stop the loss of data and enhance revenues." Distil's Content Protection Network (CPN) protects a business' web visitors, search engine ranking, and consequently website revenue by making real-time decisions on the validity of each website connection through patent-pending algorithms. Distil's platform seamlessly distinguishes search engines and human visitors from malicious bots and harmful traffic with no false positives. In addition, the Distil service accelerates content, improving page load times and reducing server load. "Rami Essaid is a dynamic CEO. He is a true visionary with demonstrated business, as well as technical skills," says Lister Delgado, Director of Distil and Managing Partner at IDEA Fund Partners. A content protection visionary, Distil Co-Founder and CEO Rami Essaid has been recognized as a '30 under 30' and one of Fourteen Entrepreneurs to Watch by Under30CEO. "We saw a fundamental flaw in how data was shared on the internet; it was the wild west with bots harvesting and stealing anything they wanted to," says Rami Essaid. "Our vision is to allow website owners to regain control of their data and stop bots from menacing the web." Research conducted by Distil indicates that the total web scraping defense market exceeds 1.8 Billion dollars annually. Gartner Research confirms the tremendous opportunity ahead for Distil and their Content Protection Network, asserting, "Demand for Web fraud detection software and services are at an all-time high." Gartner Research estimates that the web-fraud market grew by 35% between 2010 and 2011. For more information please visit distil.it About Distil.it Distil is the leading Content Protection Network (CPN) and the first cloud-based, intelligent gatekeeper for website content. Distil's CPN makes real-time decisions and seamlessly distinguishes human visitors from malicious bots. Distil mitigates against duplicate content, improves SEO power, and accelerates the end-user experience - all while reducing server load and infrastructure demand. Distil's mission is to provide enterprise class protection safeguarding commercial and individual content producers. Protect your content, your brand, and your revenue without impacting your end-user experience. For more information, visit distil.it and follow us on Twitter @distil. About ff Venture Capital ff Venture Capital (ffvc.com) is an institutional venture capital investor in seed-stage companies. Since 1999, our Partners have made over 160 investments in over 55 companies. Our exits include Cornerstone OnDemand (IPO, CSOD) and Quigo Technologies (sold to AOL for a reported $340m). ffVC has a dozen employees based in New York and New Jersey and extensive resources dedicated to portfolio acceleration, including strategy consulting, an experienced mentor network, recruiting assistance, a pool of preferred service providers, an executive portfolio community, and in-house accounting services. About IDEA Fund Partners Headquartered in Durham, NC, IDEA Fund Partners provides seed and early stage equity funding along with company building expertise to IT, software, materials technologies and medical device companies in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. Currently investing out of its first fund, IDEA Fund Partners has invested in fourteen companies since 2007. Learn more at www.ideafundpartners.com. For IDEA Fund Partners press inquiries please contact: Matt Barber by email at [email protected], or phone 919-941-5600 x104. For press inquiries please contact: Jocelyn DeGance Graham by email at [email protected], or phone 408-568-3251. CONTACT: Jocelyn DeGance Graham [email protected] 408-568-3251 //www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/ti nf=MTMjMTAwMTg2OTMjMjQ0NzQ= |