Forter

Forter was founded in 2013 by Michael Reitblat, Alon Shemesh, and Liron Damri. The company was established with the premise that the existing e-commerce fraud-prevention market was simultaneously failing merchants in two directions: permitting actual fraud to slip through while blocking an even larger number of legitimate customers through overly conservative rule-based systems. The founding trio built their initial prototype in Israel, with the commercial operation headquartered in New York and the engineering nucleus anchored in Tel Aviv from the very beginning.

Forter's principal offices are in New York City, where the executive leadership team including the CEO is based, and in Tel Aviv, where the largest engineering and data science headcount is concentrated. The company also operates satellite offices in London, serving European enterprise clients, and in Singapore, handling relationships in the Asia-Pacific market. The Tel Aviv office is located in the northern part of the city, within the dense tech corridor that runs along the coastline.

Forter is a privately held company. The most recent publicly disclosed funding event was a Series F round in April 2021 in which the company raised $300 million, led by Tiger Global Management, at a post-money valuation of $3 billion. Prior to that round, Forter had raised a cumulative total of approximately $525 million across Series A through E rounds, with investors including Sequoia Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, and NewView Capital. As of mid-2025, Forter has not filed for an IPO and is not listed on any stock exchange.

Forter employs an estimated 500 to 600 people globally, though the company does not publish precise headcount figures. The Tel Aviv R&D center is home to the largest single concentration of employees — estimated at 200 to 300 — encompassing engineering, machine learning, product management, and security research. The remainder of the workforce is split between New York, London, and Singapore, primarily in go-to-market, sales, customer success, and marketing functions.

The company's primary product is a real-time e-commerce fraud prevention platform that delivers binary approve/decline decisions on online transactions in under 200 milliseconds, powered by a proprietary Identity Network built on behavioral signals from over one billion accounts and transactions. This SaaS API-based decision engine operates without requiring manual review queues on the merchant side.

The most significant product development of the past 12 months (through mid-2025) was the augmentation of Forter's core fraud management capabilities with generative AI features and the expansion of the Payment Optimization product line, which shifts the company's value proposition from purely defensive fraud prevention to active revenue uplift by improving authorization rates with issuing banks. Forter is an independent company and is not a subsidiary of any parent organization.

Forter's primary product line is built around the Forter Decision Engine, an automated real-time approval system for e-commerce transactions. Unlike fraud-scoring tools that provide merchants with a risk score and leave the accept/reject decision to a human operator or rule engine, Forter takes full ownership of the decision. The product is sold as a guarantee: Forter decides, and if that decision results in a fraudulent transaction being approved, Forter absorbs the chargeback cost. This shifts the product category from fraud analytics to fraud liability management.

The domain-specific problem Forter solves is fundamentally asymmetric. E-commerce merchants lose more revenue annually from declined legitimate customers — so-called false positives — than from actual fraud. Studies including those cited by Forter's own marketing materials suggest that global merchants decline as much as $118 billion in legitimate orders annually due to overly aggressive fraud filters, compared to fraud losses in the $40-50 billion range. Forter's architecture is designed to shift the operating point on the precision-recall curve toward maximizing approvals while constraining fraud, rather than maximizing fraud detection at the cost of false positives.

Forter's customer base is composed predominantly of large enterprise merchants in e-commerce, travel, and financial services verticals. Named public customers include Nordstrom, Instacart, ASOS, Adobe, Priceline, Walgreens, Marriott International, and Samsung. The typical buyer is a fraud risk management team, often reporting to the Chief Risk Officer or Chief Financial Officer, at companies with annual gross merchandise volume exceeding $100 million. Forter does not serve small and medium businesses or individual developers.

The company sells exclusively through a sales-led motion with long enterprise contract cycles. There is no self-serve onboarding path, free tier, or developer trial. Sales cycles typically run three to nine months and involve proof-of-concept deployments where Forter's decisions are run in shadow mode alongside the merchant's existing system before full cutover. Channel partnerships with payment processors and commerce platform vendors also bring Forter into RFP processes, particularly through Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Shopify Plus integrations.

Pricing is not publicly disclosed in full, but Forter is understood to operate on a transaction-volume-based model — charging a fee per transaction processed or a percentage of the transaction value — combined with a base platform fee in multi-year enterprise contracts. This model aligns Forter's financial incentives with the merchant's GMV growth and is designed to scale with the customer's business rather than charging per seat or per user.

Forter's primary technical moat is its Identity Network, a cross-merchant behavioral graph that spans over one billion accounts. Because this network accumulates signal from every merchant on the platform, each new merchant that joins immediately benefits from fraud signals detected at other merchants — a classic network-effect moat. Building a comparable dataset would require years and a comparable merchant base, making replication difficult for new entrants.

Forter's engineering organization works day-to-day with Python and Java for backend services, Apache Kafka for real-time event streaming, Cassandra and PostgreSQL for persistent identity data, and Kubernetes on AWS for orchestration. Machine learning pipelines use XGBoost gradient boosting models alongside deep learning architectures for behavioral biometrics analysis. The team applies feature engineering extensively on raw behavioral signals including mouse movement, typing cadence, device fingerprinting, and navigation patterns.

Forter Fraud Management is the flagship product and the original founding offering, launched in 2013. It accepts a JSON payload containing transaction details, device signals, and user behavior data via REST API and returns an approve or decline decision within milliseconds. The product is backed by the Chargeback Guarantee: any approved transaction that subsequently results in a fraud-related chargeback is financially covered by Forter. This guarantee is the primary differentiator in enterprise sales conversations and has been part of the offering since the company's inception.

Forter Payment Optimization was developed as a distinct product line focused on issuer authorization rather than fraud. Even after a merchant's fraud system approves a transaction, the issuing bank can decline it independently — a phenomenon that costs merchants an estimated 5-15% of total attempted transactions. Forter Payment Optimization sends trust signals to the issuing bank in the authorization request, improving the likelihood that the bank will approve the transaction. The product was positioned in 2022-2023 as the expansion path for existing Fraud Management customers, representing an upsell opportunity that directly connects to revenue growth rather than cost avoidance.

Forter Identity Protection is a product module addressing account takeover (ATO), the threat vector in which stolen credentials — sourced from data breaches sold on dark web marketplaces — are used to access merchant accounts and make fraudulent purchases. The product analyzes behavioral biometric signals at login time, including typing rhythm, device handling characteristics, and navigation patterns, to distinguish credential-stuffing bots from legitimate account holders. Forter has cited accuracy improvements in detecting ATO as a key outcome of this module.

Forter's commerce platform integrations span Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento), SAP Commerce Cloud, and Shopify Plus. The company also has a presence on the Salesforce AppExchange, enabling Salesforce Commerce Cloud merchants to activate the Forter API through a managed connector. Native mobile SDKs for iOS and Android allow mobile commerce apps to send device-level behavioral signals that enrich the decision engine's input.

Forter holds SOC 2 Type II certification, which covers the security, availability, and confidentiality of the transaction data processed through its platform. The company also complies with PCI DSS Level 1 requirements, mandatory for any entity handling payment card data at scale. While exact certification dates are not publicly documented in a single disclosure, Forter has cited both certifications in enterprise sales materials and security documentation available on its website. The company also maintains GDPR compliance measures for its European operations.

Signifyd, founded in 2012 and headquartered in San Jose, California, is Forter's most direct competitor. Both companies offer an e-commerce fraud decision engine with a chargeback guarantee, and both target the same enterprise retail accounts. The key architectural difference is that Signifyd relies more heavily on supervised machine learning models trained per-merchant, while Forter emphasizes its cross-merchant Identity Network as the core differentiator. In competitive evaluations at large retailers, Forter and Signifyd are frequently the two finalists. Signifyd raised $205 million in a Series E round in 2021 at a valuation of approximately $1.3 billion, and remains privately held.

Riskified, a Tel Aviv-founded company founded in 2012 by Eido Gal and Assaf Feldman, is the only direct competitor that has gone public, completing its NYSE IPO in July 2021 under the ticker RSKD at a price of $21 per share. Riskified offers a chargeback guarantee model nearly identical in structure to Forter's. Its public financial disclosures show revenue of approximately $269 million in fiscal year 2023 and a customer base that includes HUGO BOSS, Farfetch, and On Running. Riskified's share price declined significantly from its IPO high through 2022-2023 but the company has remained operationally active with a large enterprise customer base.

Kount, acquired by Equifax in February 2021 for $640 million, represents a third category of competitor: one backed by a massive credit bureau's proprietary data assets. Post-acquisition, Kount has been positioned as Equifax's fraud intelligence product and benefits from Equifax's credit file and identity data that neither Forter nor Signifyd can match in depth. However, product agility has reportedly been constrained by the integration into a large enterprise parent, which Forter has used as a talking point in competitive situations.

In terms of analyst recognition, Forter was positioned as a Strong Performer in the Forrester Wave: Digital Fraud Management, Q4 2023 report. Gartner does not maintain a Magic Quadrant specifically for e-commerce fraud prevention as a standalone category, covering it instead within broader identity and fraud intelligence reports where Forter appears but without a formal quadrant position as of 2024.

Forter's pricing is premium relative to legacy rule-based fraud tools. The company competes on total cost of ownership by arguing that improvements in authorization rates and elimination of false-positive revenue loss offset the higher per-transaction cost. Forter does not offer a free tier, a freemium model, or a self-service entry point, which effectively bars it from the SMB segment and positions it squarely at the enterprise level.

Priceline published a case study in 2020 crediting Forter with a 50% reduction in chargebacks and a measurable increase in booking completion rates. Marriott International's adoption of Forter was announced publicly and featured in the company's marketing materials from 2021 onward. The overall trajectory for Forter is one of expansion into adjacent product categories — from fraud prevention into payment optimization and identity protection — as the core fraud market matures and competitive pressure from Riskified and Signifyd intensifies on pure fraud metrics.

The broader e-commerce fraud prevention market is estimated by Juniper Research at approximately $10 billion in 2025, growing at a compound annual rate of around 14%. Tailwinds include the continued growth of digital commerce, the expansion of buy-now-pay-later payment schemes that create new fraud vectors, and increased regulatory scrutiny of card-not-present transactions in Europe under PSD2. Forter has not made any known acquisitions of other companies.

Forter's Israeli operations are located in Tel Aviv, specifically in the northern tech district of the city. No secondary Israeli offices in Haifa, Beer Sheva, Herzliya, Petah Tikva, or Jerusalem have been publicly identified. The Tel Aviv office has served as the company's engineering headquarters since founding in 2013, a structure that has remained unchanged even as the commercial headquarters formally consolidated in New York.

The Israel headcount encompasses the full engineering organization — including backend software engineering, machine learning engineering, data science, security research, DevOps/SRE, and product management. Approximately 200 to 300 of Forter's estimated global workforce of 500 to 600 are believed to be based in Israel, making Tel Aviv the single largest site by headcount. Customer success, enterprise sales, marketing, finance, and legal are primarily staffed in New York and London.

In 2022, as the global tech hiring slowdown took effect, Forter reduced its headcount alongside a broader contraction in Israeli tech hiring. The company has not publicly announced a formal layoff event, but open positions on job boards and LinkedIn declined materially during 2022-2023 compared to the aggressive post-Series-F hiring push of 2021. As of 2024-2025, hiring in Israel has resumed at a moderate pace consistent with product expansion into Payment Optimization and AI-augmented features.

All three of Forter's founders — Michael Reitblat, Alon Shemesh, and Liron Damri — are Israeli. Michael Reitblat, who serves as CEO, is an alumnus of IDF Unit 8200, and his experience with signals intelligence and large-scale data analysis is credited internally with shaping the Identity Network architecture. The CTO and VP Engineering roles have historically been occupied by Israeli engineers based in Tel Aviv, continuing the pattern of technical leadership residing in Israel.

Roles Forter typically recruits for in Israel include senior backend engineers in Python and Java, machine learning engineers, applied scientists in anomaly detection and behavioral modeling, data engineers, DevOps and SRE engineers, and product managers for the fraud and payment optimization product lines. Frontend engineering roles (React) and QA automation positions appear periodically but less frequently. Security researchers with expertise in fraud schemes and dark web intelligence are also recruited in Israel.

Sequoia Capital, through its Israel-affiliated operations, participated in Forter's earlier funding rounds, representing a notable Israeli institutional investor connection. Forter has not announced any Israel-specific strategic partnerships with domestic companies or government entities. The company's talent pipeline draws heavily from IDF Unit 8200 alumni for data science and security research roles, a pattern consistent with other Israeli fraud-intelligence companies including its competitor Riskified. This 8200 pipeline provides a measurable cultural fingerprint: high technical rigor in adversarial thinking, familiarity with signal-based detection at scale, and a bias toward empirical rather than rule-based approaches to identifying anomalous behavior.