Super stealthy security startup, Shape Security, has recruited Google’s ex-“click-fraud czar” Shuman Ghosemajumder to its executive team where he’ll be charged with leading the company’s marketing, strategy and partnerships efforts.
Mountain View-based Shape is said to be developing a new category of web defense products that take a different approach to security that shifts costs from defenders to hackers. It hopes to achieve this via its “military-grade technology” that doesn’t rely on past attack signatures, and instead forces hackers to “spend more and more to achieve less and less.”
The startup’s founders come from Google, the Department of Defense and major defense contractors, while the Google connection doesn’t end there. Shape’s backers include Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures, as part of a $6 million Series A round, co-led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Accel Partner Peter Wagner, Sequoia Limited Partner Guarav Garg, Vodafone CTO Chris Burke, Baseline Ventures, and unnamed executives at LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook also participated.
But back to Ghosemajumder, who brings some serious clout to Shape. During his time at Google, he won two ‘Google Founders Awards’ for his entrepreneurial and technical achievements. Known affectionately as the “click-fraud czar”, Ghosemajumder was an early product manager on Google’s AdSense offering and part of the team that launched Gmail and co-founded Google’s Privacy Council.