In the past five years, fraud prevention platform SEON has grown from a two-person company to a team of more than 200 employees with more than $100 million in venture capital.
Founded in Hungary and headquartered in London, SEON has set its sights on the U.S. market after raising a $94 million Series B in April. To ensure the go-to-market effort is a success, Bence Jendruszak, the company’s co-founder and COO, is currently moving from Budapest to Austin, the company’s new U.S. headquarters.
SEON already has six U.S. employees, four of which are in Austin. The company currently rents a coworking space, but Jendruszak is actively scouting bigger office spaces. In the next six to nine months, he hopes to grow the U.S. team to about 20 employees, primarily in business development and customer success roles.
“I feel like I can hand off the responsibilities that I’ve been dealing with for years, and I can focus on getting back to that early stage of growing a team from zero to about 20 people,” he said. “It’s going to be like the early days when we were a team of 20 here in Hungary.”
Jendruszak said he is looking forward to moving to Austin, meeting other people in the thriving startup scene and establishing relationships as he works to drum up business in North and South America.
SEON cracks down on fraudulent users by gathering live data about users’ digital footprints, which means tracking where their phone numbers, email addresses and IP addresses have appeared on the internet, as well as the social media accounts they have created. The platform uses machine learning and human intelligence to determine the likelihood of users being scammers.
The company’s fraud prevention platform is used by big-name financial services companies in the U.S., such as Patreon and Afterpay, along with London-based Revolut and Brazil-based Nubank. SEON’s new go-to-market team will also be prospecting U.S. e-commerce companies and companies in the burgeoning online gambling industry. SEON has applied for a gambling license to be able to help these companies screen for fraud, Jendruszak said.
SEON is currently hiring for nearly a dozen roles in the U.S. with several in Austin.
