Data services provider LexisNexis Risk Solutions agreed to acquire Emailage, a fraud prevention technology provider backed by IT services firm Wipro, reportedly for $480m. Wipro’s corporate venturing arm, Wipro Ventures had backed the series B round’s $10m first tranche in 2017. Emailage will be part of the Business Services group at LexisNexis while its data network will inform the buyer’s existing Digital Identity Network.
Founded in 2012, Emailage offers a software product which employs machine learning and a dynamic data network to analyse email communications, issuing digital identity scores to customers in order to reduce risk from fraudulent email accounts.
The company is part of the broader cybersecurity space, which has been under the radar of corporate investors and received much attention in recent years, as the historical bar chart from GCV Analytics here illustrates. The number of corporate-backed deals in this space reached a peak (99 rounds) in 2018 and the total estimated capital in such rounds registered an all-time-high at $3.35bn last year.
