The startup called Are You a Human has received $4.2 million in funding. That money will be put toward managing the bots that are causing Internet issues. Detroit Venture Partners were the leaders in the Series A round. Some of the organizations involved were Foundry Group Angles, NCT Ventures, and MDC Dream Ventures.
Reining in the bots will be the focus of the $4.2 million funding that came on June 18 for the startup. Are You Human is based in Detroit, MI. It describes itself as ‘The Whitelist of Verified Humans.’ In other words, if you have a digital service, ad or commerce item, you can confirm you are speaking with a verified human.
Given the business model is based on knowing a human is in fact human, the funding was a necessity. Bots can make it so that verification is not a smooth or accurate process. Its founders are Benjamin Blackmer, Tyler Paxton, and Reid Tatoris. The current CEO is Ben Trenda. The startup began in 2011.
The latest $4.2 million round of funding makes the total for Are You Human to add up to $6.8 million. That amount has been raised over four rounds. The last investment was $1.8 million in a Venture round that occurred on May 14, 2014; the investor was MDC Dream Ventures. Prior to that, an Undisclosed investment was made Feb 6, 2013. The monetary amount that time was $801 thousand.
While bots make up about 59 percent of traffic online every single day, Are You Human strives to pick out who are the real humans online that companies want to connect with to communicate in high-quality ways. As bots cannot interact every day like a normal person, they are weeded out by the startup and not added to the list ever; that means the list only contains actual humans.