Now Indian-origin Start-up Impermium Is Joining Google

Indian-origin start-ups never had it so good when it comes to getting lapped up by global giants. Only a couple of weeks ago, Facebook
acquired Bangalore-based tech start-up Little Eye Labs and now search giant Google has picked up a three-year-old web security start-up with India connections. Impermium, Google’s latest acquisition, develops security products for websites and has offices in Bangalore and California. However, the financials of the deal has not been disclosed yet.

Besides Mark Risher, the CEO of Impermium, the company has two Indian co-founders – Vish Ramarao (CTO) and Naveen Jamal. All three of them were colleagues in Yahoo but decided to leave the company and started the new venture back in 2011. While Risher and Ramarao are based in California, Jamal is in charge of the Bangalore office.

Jamal originally hails from Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu. He had been to the US to pursue higher studies and also worked as a software engineer in Sift before joining Yahoo in 1998 as a principal engineer. Ramarao is from Bangalore but went to the US for higher studies. Before joining Impermium, he led engineering for Yahoo! Mail anti-spam, security and data mining, and was involved in protecting every major component of the Yahoo network from spam, fraud, misuse.

Risher helped co-found the business in 2011, quickly picking up $1 million in seed funding from Accel Partners, AOL Ventures, Archimedes Capital, Charles River Ventures, Embarcadero Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Greylock Discovery Fund and Morado Ventures, according to a TechCrunch report. In the same year, it raised $8 million in a Series A round led by Highland Capital Partners and supported by Freestyle Capital (which also contributed to the seed round) and Social+Capital Partnership. The start-up claims to have a 300,000 strong client base including key companies such as Tumblr, Pinterest, CNN, ESPN, Typepad and Washington Post.

Impermium has not detailed its future plans post the acquisition and its site now features just a note from Risher that says:

When we founded Impermium three years ago, our mission was to help rid the web of spam, fraud, and abuse. As sites gain in popularity, criminals and miscreants are never far behind, and Impermium has worked hard to defend some of the largest and fastest-growing sites. By joining Google, our team will merge with some of the best abuse fighters in the world. With our combined talents we’ll be able to further our mission and help make the Internet a safer place. We’re excited about the possibilities.

In an earlier interview with TOI, Risher said that the start-up had built a number of services that worked as a risk-determination system. Impermium calculates the severity of the risk based on parameters like where you accessed the account from, the device software and historical usage pattern of the links you are posting.

Prior to buying Impermium, Google acquired Nest Labs, the maker of the Nest Learning Thermostat and Protect smoke detector, for $3.2 billion in cash. The latest acquisition is bound to boost the Internet giant as Impermium specialises in controlling spam, fraud and all kinds of web abuse.