Founder Case Study:  Veracity Trust Network

I have heard the word ‘bot’ for a long time now and had a vague idea of what they were – at least I thought so.  More recently, I attended a pitch event in Hong Kong with a delegation of ‘tech companies’ from the UK presenting.  One of the companies was led by a Founder, Nigel Bridges, a company involved with cyber security.  We later met up and talked in more depth about his work and this article draws mainly from that meeting.

What is a ‘bot’?

“Essentially, a bot is an automated software application that performs repetitive tasks across a network and follows instructions to imitate human behaviour – but in a much faster and more accurate fashion.”  Some are harmless, some even provide a useful service by scraping information that could be important research for your business.

But some can be malicious, looking to exploit vulnerabilities found in websites (‘ransomware’).

And there are other bots that are less threatening but can still harm you, such as wasting the amount of money in your ad spend by pretending to be ‘real people’.

The one other point worth mentioning is that surveys have estimated that bots account for close to 50% of all activity on the internet.  That number is almost certain to increase as all our processes become more automated.

How Veracity got started

What interviewing Nigel, he described an interesting journey to get to where he is today.

“Myself and two other founders started it about six years ago now. Initially, we started the company because there’s a very big problem in the online advertising industry where bots, non-humans will click on ads, thus wasting budget. It’s a very straightforward problem.  That actually gives you two problems. Problem number one, you waste money. And problem number two is your analytics are wrong because if a bot clicks on an ad and you don’t know it’s a bot and you think it’s a human, you probably make bad decisions. So that’s where we started. We developed software in order to try to differentiate bot clicks from human clicks so that analytics would be better.”

I have always been interested in psychology, it was my minor in undergraduate, and so when Nigel told me they did ‘behavioral analysis’ in their bot detection I was intrigued (I had this image of a bot lying on a couch being psychoanalyzed).   As Nigel explained:

“Let’s take an easy example. If you, for example, go onto a website and you start interacting through the browser, you will be exhibiting behavior that only you as a human can exhibit. So, the way you move your mouse, the way you type.  If you go onto your phone, the way that your thumb interacts with the screen and so on.  And so there will be peculiarities that you and I will do as humans.

So, writing a software bot to emulate that is incredibly difficult.  Whereas, for a bot to move a mouse it has to use a mathematical formula because it’s a robot, it’s a software routine. So can we exploit those micro differences to see whether it really is a human or whether it’s a very clever bot pretending to be a human.”

It was a fascinating point for me.  I have always said that a little understanding of psychology was important in business as much of what we do is human interaction and negotiation.  But I never thought I would be using psychology to analyze bots!  Can we characterize this as “thinking outside of the bot”?

On a more serious note, many years of research supported by machine learning was put in to get to the level of effectiveness they are at today.  As they started off in the ad industry, they have a lot of data about both human and bot behaviour.  The other essential aspect of the software is ‘fast computation in real time’ as this is the speed at which bots operate.

There was a lot more about the discussion and if the reader wants to listen to the whole interview I have put the link of the Vlog at the end.

Summary

Being involved with Founder Institute has taught me the importance of making sure any new company is addressing a pressing real-world problem.  Given how omnipresent the internet is in our life and, also, how omnipresent bots are on the internet then we can see this is a major and pressing problem for all of us.  It is also interesting to see how they developed two related but separate revenue streams, one in cyber security – stopping bot attacks – and a second in reducing ad spend – not paying for all the bot clicks.

Lastly, Nigel closed off with a fascinating view of the future:

“I think the key here, one of the things that we always keep in mind is that the market is growing rapidly. People are writing more and more sophisticated bots. For example, with Gen.ai coming through and quantum computing coming through, that will change the world really, really dramatically. So, people, for example, that are relying on encrypting their data and thinking, oh, it doesn’t matter if my data is stolen, it’s encrypted.  Well, within the next two or three years, people will be able to break those encryption keys, and that data will be all over the web. And these are going to be tools that the bad actors are going to have their hands on just as quickly as the good guys. So, we’ve got to keep on top of this and keep keeping on top of this.”

Our brave, new world.

Visit Veracity at:  https://veracitytrustnetwork.com/

If you want to listen to the entire Vlog, it can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbMebjWnpTE

John D. Evans, CFA

SEIML Ventures

21 November 2024