SINGAPORE--(Marketwired - Sep 29, 2016) - EDBI, headquartered in Singapore, today announced a strategic new investment in U.S.-based Shape Security, a global provider of advanced security technology for web and mobile applications. Contributing to the close of a $40 million (USD) Series D round of funding with participation from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), EDBI will help Shape accelerate its growth in the APAC region.

To date, Shape has prevented more than $1.1 billion in fraud losses for its Fortune 500 and government customers. Shape is deployed as the primary line of application defense on all customer transactions for two of the top 10 airlines in the world, the world's largest hotel company, the world's largest bank, one of the top 10 retailers in the world, and one of the largest government agencies. Shape's mobile solution, formally launched in January of 2016, now protects more than 20 percent of all in-store mobile payments worldwide.

"As automated attacks on web and mobile sites become more prevalent and harder to defend against with existing solutions, we believe Shape Security's highly innovative cybersecurity platform can be a game changer that offers enterprises real-time protection against such threats," said CHU Swee Yeok, CEO and President of EDBI. "We are pleased that Shape is leveraging Singapore to access Asian customers and partners in the region to advance their global growth strategy."

Automated threats are responsible for millions in fraud losses per day, targeting web and mobile applications of retailers, banks, airlines, healthcare organizations and government agencies. Existing defenses cannot stop the cybercriminals, who use increasingly automated attack tools to imitate populations of legitimate users to carry out credential stuffing attacks (resulting in large-scale account takeovers), application DDoS attacks, content scraping, and other threats. The Shape platform was designed to constantly evolve to stay ahead of cybercriminals.

"Over the past year, we've scaled the capabilities of technology and now we're looking forward to further scaling our business," said Derek Smith, CEO of Shape Security. "With this new investment from EDBI, we'll be able to support more organizations in the APAC region to defend against automated (bot) attacks."

Shape previously announced a first close of $25 million that included existing investors Baseline Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, NVP, Venrock, Google Ventures, and Eric Schmidt, as well as Northern Light Ventures, which invests in technology companies growing in China. The round brings Shape's total funding to $106 million since being founded in late 2011.

About EDBI
As a premier Asian investor, EDBI invests in knowledge and innovation-intensive sectors covering Information & Communication Technology (ICT), Smart & Sustainable Technology (SST), Biomedical Sciences (BMS), and select industry clusters under its Strategic Growth Programme (SGP). Under ICT, EDBI seeks investment opportunities in Fintech, Data Analytics, Info Security and Software Infrastructure. Taking a long term investment outlook, EDBI helps to grow companies in Asia and globally through Singapore. www.edbi.com.

About Shape Security
The world's leading financial, retail and travel companies and government agencies rely on Shape Security as their primary line of defense against cyber fraud and data breaches on their web and mobile applications. The Shape platform, covered by 23 U.S. patents, was designed to stop the most dangerous application attacks enabled by cybercriminal automation tools, including credential stuffing (account takeover), application DDoS, unauthorized aggregation, and other threats. Shape has prevented over $1 billion in fraud losses for its customers and protects more than 20% of the world's in-store mobile payments. Shape is headed by industry leaders from Google, Cisco, IBM, Raytheon, Palo Alto Networks, and the Pentagon.