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Brother Duo Comes Out Of Stealth With Threat Detection Startup Honeypot

Maija Ehlinger

Maija Ehlinger

— 3 min read
Brother Duo Comes Out Of Stealth With Threat Detection Startup Honeypot
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Brothers Mitch Seymour and Mark Seymour are on a mission to make websites safer…by helping companies understand the reputation of their users and track unwanted behaviors on their platforms. Right now, it is pretty easy for nefarious actors to get around blockers a website puts up. Or put another way, a person’s reputation isn’t really all that sticky online. “A lot of companies have detection in place for unwanted user activity. But they lose visibility when bad actors change their client or network.,” Mitch told Hypepotamus.That was something Mitch saw a lot of during his time on the Trust and Safety team at OpenSea. The large web3 marketplace was dealing with suspicious transactions, theft, and new forms of copyright infringement. Mitch built an internal Trust & Safety platform to keep up with threat and compliance problems across the site.As it turns out, this technology is useful for a wide range of companies, including payment companies, fintechs, banks, and ecommerce sites. After realizing how many companies needed a better way to collect threat analytics, Mitch decided it was time to launch Atlanta-based Honeypot. 

Get To Know Honeypot

Honeypot works similarly to Google Analytics. Companies drop a script on their web page and Honeypot is able to start monitoring for potential threats. The platform allows abuse prevention teams to “capture and study behavior” of users that pose operational or legal risks, added Mitch. That is important if websites are dealing with bots, network manipulation, sanctioned activity, review spam, or other problematic behaviors.
Mitch Seymour (LinkedIn)
“Our focus is not only on detecting unwanted user behavior, but making sure that their reputation is sticky and continues to follow them,” added Mitch. This is why a core feature of Honeypot is a patent-pending identity graph, specifically built for tracking the reputation of users. Honeypot also comes with an AI-powered rules engine, which allows companies to customize behaviors they want to deter on their website. You can define a target behavior in natural language (e.g. "10 or more product reviews in a 5 minute period"), and Honeypot will automatically flag users that exhibit that behavior.As a textbook author on real-time data processing, Mitch has also focused on making Honeypot highly performant. Threat insights are delivered extremely fast to customers, usually within a few milliseconds.

Gaining Tractions 

Mitch, who spent much of his career as an engineer at Mailchimp, started working on Honeypot full-time in January of 2023. Mark, an 11-year veteran of the US Army,  joined in October after leading strategic partnerships at the food delivery giant Grubhub. Alongside the brothers, Honeypot has brought in some former Mailchimp machine learning engineers to help build out the platform. The team has also gained traction from Atlanta-based VCs. Local firms Knoll Ventures, and Overline are also backing the early-stage startup. As the team comes out of stealth, the team is eager to find customers in their hometown. “Atlanta is a great community and tech hub. It’s a great place to battle test the software and develop our vision. If we could find early adopters within our community, that would be a huge opportunity,” Mitch added.

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