US-based search engine Google’s corporate venturing unit has joined the venture firm of Eric Schmidt, TomorrowVentures, backing Shape Security.
Google Ventures topped up Shape’s April series A round, which initially raised $5.6m of a planned $5.8m round, according to a filing with US regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission, was led by venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and TomorrowVentures.
Other backers of the round were venture firm Baseline Ventures, former partners at venture firms Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, and executives from technology companies Dropbox, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Karim Faris, a partner at Google Ventures, said: “We are in a unique position to see the threat of botnet attacks on a truly global scale, and it is far greater than most people realize. With Shape’s technology, major web and social media properties will be able to protect their sites and users from automated attacks in new and innovative ways. Shape’s approach will make building and running botnets onerous and cost-prohibitive for attackers, completely changing the dynamic of web security.”
The company added it had recruited former Google ‘click fraud czar,’ Shuman Ghosemajumder, to drive marketing, strategy and business development. Ghosemajumder was an early product manager on Google’s AdSense offering and helped grow that product to more than $2bn in revenue. He was also part of the team that launched Gmail and co-founded Google’s Privacy Council.
Co-founder Sumit Agarwal was at Google for seven and a half years, where he was the head of mobile product management for North America. Other former Google executives Deep Nishar (now at LinkedIn), Gokul Rajaram (now at Facebook) and Ramsey Homsany (now at Dropbox) are also investors in the company.