Jscrambler raises $15M Series A to help defend against website attacks

Jscrambler, a Portugal-based startup specializing in cybersecurity products that protect organizations against web data exfiltration attacks, has secured $15 million in Series A funding.

The investment, which comes two years after the startup secured $2.3 million in seed funding, was led by Ace Capital Partners and backed by existing investors Sonae IM and Portugal Ventures. Jscrambler said it will use the cash injection to “strengthen and accelerate” its product roadmap to meet its customers’ expanding requirements as threat actors increasingly turn to the web.

“We’re seeing clear growth in complex attacks targeting the client-side of websites and yet there are currently no simple and effective solutions to deal with them,” Rui Ribeiro, Jscrambler co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. “This partially stems from misinformation surrounding technologies such as web application firewalls, and the current native browser defenses are severely lacking when it comes to effectively preventing client-side attacks.”

Jscrambler claims it addresses this shortfall. Its Code Integrity tool, which includes polymorphic obfuscation, code locks and self-defending capabilities, scrambles web source code into a form that is extremely hard to reverse-engineer, helping organizations prevent intellectual property theft, application abuse, piracy and data leakage. 

The startup also offers a Webpage Integrity module that protects against web supply-chain attacks by detecting any sign of malicious behavior on the client-side and defining rules that effectively block and prevent malicious behavior before it happens. This tool also helps to stop Magecart web skimming attacks by allowing companies to create rules that effectively prevent the skimmers from running on the website and exfiltrating credit card information.

“This marks the beginning of an era where companies will be able to take ownership of their client-side and control everything that happens there,” Ribeiro said.

The startup’s Series A investment will be used to add more capabilities, including an integrated solution that enables website owners to protect the client-side to secure user data and improve compliance with regulations such as Europe’s GDPR, California’s CCPA and U.S. health privacy rules HIPAA.

Jscrambler, which was founded in 2014 and currently has 40 employees, also announced that Pedro Abreu has joined the startup as an independent board member. Abreu is currently COO at Silicon Valley-based cyberrisk startup Exabeam, having previously served as an executive at ForeScout and McAfee.