ThetaRay is a big data analytics solutions provider that harnesses the power of unsupervised machine learning to protect financial institutions and other organizations against unknown threats. The company is dedicated to helping clients at large banks, cybersecurity divisions and critical infrastructure become more resilient and tap opportunities. ThetaRay has raised more than $30 million from investors including General Electric, Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), Poalim Capital Markets and others.
The Problem
Financial organizations are collecting and wrangling more data than ever; at the same time, fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated in their attacks, exploiting numerous channels and products in their schemes. Losses are increasing, regulatory pressure is growing, costs are spiraling out of control, and bankings’ traditional, rules-based systems generate thousands of false positive alerts each day, wasting time and money while failing to spot the real threats.
ThetaRay’s Solution
ThetaRay’s advanced solutions function with unparalleled speed, accuracy and scale, helping organizations to manage risk, detect money laundering schemes, uncover fraud, expose bad loans, unearth operational issues and reveal valuable new growth opportunities. Its patented mathematical algorithms can process tens of thousands of parameters simultaneously, helping to automatically identify risks – including “the unknown unknowns” – across multiple environments, systems and sources in real-time, with industry-low false positives.
About the Company
The company was established in 2013 by two of the world’s foremost mathematicians – Prof. Amir Averbuch and Prof. Ronald Coifman – and managed by CEO Mark Gazit, with a mission to transform the way that the world benefits from data. They spent 15 years developing a set of proprietary machine learning and AI algorithms, which now power ThetaRay’s big data analytics platform.
CEO Mark Gazit has over 20 years of experience in Israeli and international high-tech companies. He served as managing director of Nice Track, which provides software and hardware solutions to government agencies worldwide in the areas of information intelligence and cyber. He was also the group president & CEO of SkyVision, which he built from the start-up stage into an international company serving over 50 countries. Mark has held additional pivotal roles in leading companies.
What Makes ThetaRay Innovative?
“The most revolutionary aspect of our solution is that its approach to analytics starts without any assumptions about data,” says Mark Gazit. “We believe that the most meaningful anomalies are hidden within rich, hyper-dimensional data. We let the math find the meaning.”
The company’s algorithms begin by modeling a ‘normal’ profile for the customer’s data. Once this baseline is set, the technology can rapidly detect any anomalies and determine the exact parameters that triggered them. The platform analyzes immense amounts of big data generated in day-to-day operations, through a process that requires no manual intervention, threshold/rule settings, security updates, or big data expertise.
ThetaRay also prevents ‘alert fatigue,’ which can cause security analysts to miss real threats because they are forced to wade through thousands of false alarms every day. ThetaRay’s solution is to cluster related anomalies together into single events, enabling swift, incisive remediation. Forensics are auto-generated as soon as an alert is issued, and displayed on an intuitive dashboard that empowers security and operational teams with meaningful, actionable information they can use to investigate and rapidly mitigate threats.
ThetaRay’s technology is used in many industries, including critical infrastructure, industrial, aviation and others. However, at this time, the company is focused principally on the financial sector, helping some of the largest banks in the US, Europe and Asia to detect money laundering schemes, uncover fraud, predict loans that are likely to fail, find the jewels in the rough of poor credit histories, and more. Through its partnership with GE, ThetaRay also protects the Industrial Internet of Things.
Looking Towards the Future
Mark Gazit sees tremendous opportunity in the growing IoT market. “As billions of machines, devices, and other ‘things’ increasingly join us in cyberspace, businesses will experience a deluge of old, new, and completely unprecedented risks and attack schemes targeting them,” he states. “Although attackers’ motivations — financial gain, disruption, warfare — may remain the same, these new and unfamiliar threats could be catastrophic to operational technology and business operations. So organizations everywhere are turning to game-changing technologies like ThetaRay to help them survive this new reality.”