Chicago-based FingerprintJS, a company focused on browser fingerprinting-as-a-service, today announced the completion of an $8 million series A funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners. This brings FingerprintJS’ total raised to $12 million. The company plans to use the capital to expand its fraud prevention capabilities further into the enterprise market.
Fingerprinting technology identifies unique website visitors, including those who enter their session through incognito windows, use VPNs, or block cookies. Developers embed FingerprintJS’ API into their code to address issues like online fraud, spam, and account takeovers with more accurate user identification.
The company launched its enterprise-grade SaaS product FingerprintJS Pro in 2020. But FingerprintJS’ earliest product dates back to 2012, when cofounder Valentin Vasilyev began building a version of the browser fingerprinting library as an open source project.
Vasilyev found that fingerprinting implementation could prevent fraud more effectively than traditional cookie-based systems. While users could easily clear cookies for anonymity, browser fingerprinting’s scripts were stickier. And a browser is identifiable by a host of values, including its agent, language, timezone offset, screen color depth, and custom plug-ins.
Based in JavaScript, FingerprintJS compiles signals inside any browser and generates a unique identifier that can detect unusual behavior patterns. This core fingerprinting technology remains open-sourced and has garnered over 10 million downloads and 12,000 GitHub stars since its release.
FingerprintJS Pro expands on its open source predecessor with improved identification accuracy, from a reported 60% to 99.5%, and cloud hosting capabilities. The pro version’s server-side analysis API appears to be key, enabling more complex analysis than was possible with the original version’s single JavaScript file. The early version queries and then hashes browser attributes, which means it will create identical fingerprints in situations where more than one person is using the same browser, in the same version, on the same type of phone or laptop.
The new server-side API can process this data on the server to analyze large masses of auxiliary data, like URL changes or IP addresses, to differentiate between users who would otherwise have the same fingerprints. The API can also process information without browser exposure to reduce the risk of external tampering.
FingerprintJS Pro use cases login pages from unauthorized users, reducing fake account signups, reducing duplicate account creation, reducing credit card fraud, and many more
FingerprintJS claims eBay, Dell, and Coinbase among its clients. The company said it is now looking to identify and build additional fraud prevention tools.
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