Dan Pinto, a serial entrepreneur located in Chicago, has secured new funding and initiated a new venture focused on bringing to market a long-standing open-source initiative designed to address a significant challenge on the internet – the prevention of fraudulent activities.

The company, established in January and known as FingerprintJS, positions itself as a novel suite of tools delivering browser fingerprinting as a service for a wide range of applications.

Built upon an open-source project that has already been downloaded 5 million times and is currently utilized by 8,000 websites (along with a base of paying customers, as reported by the company), this offering represents an advancement in browser fingerprinting technology, a method employed by businesses for several years.

FingerprintJS leverages established techniques such as canvas fingerprinting, audio sampling, WebGL fingerprinting, font detection, and browser plugin probing. However, it distinguishes itself by removing direct ties to a specific device, instead creating a unique browser identifier without relying on cookies. Businesses can then store this identifier within their systems to monitor user activity, as detailed on the company’s website.

The initial development of the open-source project occurred five years ago, spearheaded by Valentin Vasilyev, as indicated on the project’s GitHub page. Vasilyev and Pinto previously collaborated at Pinto’s former company, Machinio, which was acquired in 2018. They formally launched a business centered around Vasilyev’s project in January and have since obtained $4 million in funding to facilitate its commercial rollout.

“The open-source community has been instrumental in our progress to date,” stated Vasilyev. “We are committed to expanding on this foundation and prioritizing sales to developers. Software engineers possess a strong understanding of technology and are increasingly recognizing the effectiveness of our product in combating fraud.”

The funding round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, with additional investment from Hack VC, the Remarkable Ventures fund of the Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator, and individual investors including Rony Kahan, the chair and co-founder of Indeed, according to FingerprintJS.

“We are presented with a distinct chance to revolutionize the fraud technology landscape by empowering our clients to integrate fraud prevention directly into their applications, rather than treating it as an ancillary consideration, much like Stripe has done with payment processing,” Pinto explained. “Consider online fraud as a deceptive game where those with malicious intent continually attempt to conceal their identities to carry out fraudulent acts. Current solutions typically assign a fraud score to each visitor without attempting to ascertain their true identity. Our approach centers on uniquely identifying malicious users, thereby directly addressing the root cause of the fraud problem.”