Cheq.ai: Anti-fraud for marketers

Summary

Marketecture Podcast Summary: "Cheq.ai: Anti-fraud for Marketers"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
• Host: Ari Paparo, Marketecture Media, Inc.
• Episode: Cheq.ai: Anti-fraud for Marketers
• Release Date: March 3, 2025
• Guest: Guy Titanovich, CEO of Cheq.ai

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1. Introduction to Cheq.ai and Its Leadership

Ari Paparo welcomes listeners to the episode and introduces Guy Titanovich, the CEO of Cheq.ai. Guy provides an overview of the company's global presence, headquartered in Tel Aviv with offices in major cities including New York City, London, Berlin, and Tokyo.

[00:56] Guy Titanovich: "Thank you for having me."

2. Company Overview and Mission

Guy elaborates on Cheq.ai's mission to protect marketers from various cyber threats. The platform focuses on safeguarding every aspect of the marketing technology stack, addressing issues like bot-generated ad clicks, fake user sign-ups, and the theft of customer data by third-party marketing tools.

[01:16] Guy Titanovich: "We protect literally every part of either your martech edtech stack or the operation."

3. Target Customers and Core Problems Addressed

Cheq.ai primarily serves Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and their organizations, though it also engages with Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs). The platform offers three main packages, with the most popular being Marketing Security, designed to ensure data integrity and prevent fraudulent activities that can distort marketing analytics and decision-making processes.

[02:37] Guy Titanovich: "Our biggest, so we have three packages. The one that most customers land on first is called Marketing Security."

4. Real-World Challenges: Bot Activities Impacting Marketers

The discussion delves into the specific ways bots harm marketing efforts. Guy highlights that bots can generate fake ad clicks, leading to wasted advertising budgets, especially detrimental to small businesses. For larger enterprises, such activities can undermine data-driven decisions critical for effective marketing campaigns.

[03:35] Guy Titanovich: "One simple one to understand... is just bots clicking on your ads."

Furthermore, Guy explains that the prevalence of bots—ranging from malicious entities to analytical agents—complicates data interpretation across the internet, which is estimated to have 30-50% bot traffic.

[03:59] Guy Titanovich: "It's really hard to make decisions based on data."

5. Comprehensive Bot Mitigation Strategies

Cheq.ai employs a dual approach to handling bot interactions:

1. Blocking Malicious Activity: Identifying and preventing bots from performing harmful actions such as ad clicks and fake sign-ups.
2. Data Integrity Assurance: Ensuring that marketing data remains accurate by eliminating fraudulent inputs.

[05:39] Guy Titanovich: "We're doing both. So the first thing we do is when such a user comes in... we block them."

6. Technical Implementation and Integration with Walled Gardens

Ari and Guy discuss the challenges of integrating Cheq.ai’s solutions with major platforms often referred to as "walled gardens" like Google and Facebook. Despite these platforms having robust APIs, Cheq.ai leverages its extensive domain network and real-time data processing to identify and blacklist fraudulent users effectively.

[07:22] Guy Titanovich: "We sit on over two and a half million domains globally and we see about 30 billion user interactions a week."

7. The Evolving Landscape of AI Agents and Future Threats

Guy emphasizes the impending shift towards AI agents in user interactions. These agents, while facilitating legitimate user activities, also open new avenues for sophisticated fraud, such as AI-driven purchases and account takeovers. Cheq.ai is adapting to this trend by enhancing its ability to discern not just human vs. bot interactions but also the intent and authenticity behind them.

[09:26] Guy Titanovich: "Bots are now going to be and your best users, they are going to make purchases on our and acquisitions on our behalf of a real user's behalf."

8. Metrics and Reporting for CMOs

When asked about the insights provided to CMOs, Guy acknowledges the complexity of data but highlights two primary reporting methods:

1. Raw Data Access: Allowing clients to integrate and analyze data within their existing platforms.
2. Cheq.ai Dashboard: Offering a user-friendly interface for monitoring and managing fraud-related metrics.

[11:58] Guy Titanovich: "We prefer option B, but most customers prefer option A."

9. Pricing and Customer Segmentation

Cheq.ai caters to both enterprise-level clients and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Enterprise customers typically invest between $20,000 to $2 million annually, while SMBs pay from $1,000 to $12,000 per year. This tiered pricing structure ensures that businesses of all sizes can benefit from Cheq.ai’s anti-fraud solutions.

[19:02] Guy Titanovich: "The vast majority of our revenue, I'd say about 90% comes from enterprise customers."

10. Immediate Benefits for Small Businesses

For smaller merchants, such as Shopify store owners, Cheq.ai offers immediate cost savings by reducing click fraud, potentially saving 10-20% on cost-per-click (CPC) expenditures. This translates directly into more efficient ad spend and improved marketing ROI.

[19:42] Guy Titanovich: "The first thing... is literally the ability to save about 10 to 20% of your click or your CPC spend."

11. Lightning Round: Quick Insights

Competitive Advantage:

• Guy Tumianovich: "The ability to marry identity versus human unhuman." [20:12]

Biggest Barrier:

• Guy Tumianovich: "Market education." [20:26]

Big Players’ Involvement:

• Guy Tumianovich: "They are doing it, but they have a disadvantage. They're a sitting duck." [20:31]

Metaphorical Animal:

• Guy Tumianovich: "Lion... megalomania." [21:24]

12. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Ari concludes the interview by thanking Guy for his insights, highlighting the critical role Cheq.ai plays in safeguarding marketing efforts against evolving cyber threats. The discussion underscores the importance of advanced anti-fraud measures in an increasingly data-driven and AI-integrated marketing landscape.

[21:30] Ari Paparo: "Lion because of megalomania... thank you so much for being here."

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Key Takeaways:

• Cheq.ai provides comprehensive anti-fraud solutions tailored specifically for marketers, addressing both current bot threats and anticipated AI-driven challenges.
• The platform not only blocks malicious activities but also ensures the integrity of marketing data, enabling more accurate and effective decision-making.
• With a scalable pricing model, Cheq.ai serves a diverse range of clients, from large enterprises to SMBs, delivering immediate financial benefits and long-term security.
• As AI agents become more prevalent, Cheq.ai is at the forefront of evolving its strategies to protect against sophisticated fraud tactics, ensuring that marketers can navigate the digital landscape with confidence.

Notable Quotes:

• Guy Titanovich: "We protect literally every part of either your martech edtech stack or the operation." [01:16]
• Guy Titanovich: "The ability to marry identity versus human unhuman." [20:12]
• Guy Titanovich: "Market education." [20:26]

This episode offers valuable insights into the intersection of marketing and cybersecurity, emphasizing the necessity for advanced anti-fraud measures in today's digital economy.

Transcript

[Guy Titanovich]

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[Ari Paparo]

Welcome to market where you can get smart fast with in depth interviews of leading technology executives. I'm Ari Paparo. I'm joined today by Guy Titanovich who is the CEO of Check AI. That's C H E Q AI Guy, thank you so much for being here.

[Guy Titanovich]

Thank you for having me.

[Ari Paparo]

So you're calling in from Tel Aviv. Where's the company based?

[Guy Titanovich]

Our headquarters are in Tel Aviv, but we've got offices in New York City, London, Berlin, Tokyo and that's about it. Yeah.

[Ari Paparo]

All right. And what's the company do? What's the elevator pitch?

[Guy Titanovich]

Oh, I don't know, I'm just the CEO. They don't tell me. I try to make sure everybody behaves. But essentially, according to the website though, we check your AI. Basically we built a platform that focuses on every attack vector that hurts marketers and one of them being bots or now AI agents. And we protect literally every part of either your martech edtech stack or the operation. If bots click on your ads and that's bad, we block them. If fake users, human being users, use false identities in order to sign up for your platform, we block that. If your third party marketing tools on your website are potentially stealing your customers tii we block that without hindering their performance. So yeah, protecting marketers across the board.

[Ari Paparo]

Okay, makes sense. I think it's interesting that you're focused on marketers so we'll kind of dive into that because there's. We've interviewed a number of security companies or fraud oriented companies and they're usually a little more publisher facing. So who's your typical customer and what problems are they looking to solve?

[Guy Titanovich]

Typical customers are sometimes the CISOs, sometimes the CIOs, in most cases the CMOs or the CMO organization. Our biggest, so we have three packages. The one that most customers land on first is called Marketing Security. Very indicative of what it actually does. And again, it's comprised out of anything to unskew your marketing analytics, from fake data to preventing bots or otherwise fake and malicious users from Hurting your decision making and marketing campaigns and so on. And finally preventing even from organic visitors, from signing up with fake identities to your site, to your service and so on.

[Ari Paparo]

So what? So tell me how this happens in the real world. What sort of activities are bots doing that are causing problems for the marketer?

[Guy Titanovich]

Thankfully, a ton. One simple one to understand, and I won't even dive too deeply into it is just bots clicking on your ads. And whether you're a freelance plumber from Kentucky that spends by the way, on average about 2,000 bucks a month on Google Ads and your competitors are in a lot of the cases trying to get you to waste your budgets and in those cases you're hurt. And inside some cases it could be Fortune 500 brands, which is the majority of our ARR and where it comes from. Secondly, every company nowadays is data obsessed. Decision making is data driven and all that good stuff, especially in the online world. And that is true for whether you're a marketer or a product manager or anything really, or a CEO. And when the Internet is, according to some sources, 30 to 50% riddled with bot users, or now it's going to be AI agents, some of them are going to be very positive and not just malicious, then it's really hard to make decisions based on data. And finally, the criminal or criminality use cases can be pertaining to make your competitor make the wrong decisions. Or it could be preventing them from having inventory. Let's say you're an E commerce player and you want to make sure that your competitor is out of inventory for a specific item that you're using that you're selling. Sorry, during Black Friday or something, they would basically create a blockage using fake users because that's how you get the scale.

[Ari Paparo]

So for the simple use case where you're trying to prevent fake users from clicking on your ads, are you preventing the click or just removing it from the reporting?

[Guy Titanovich]

We're doing both. So the first thing we do is when such a user comes in and typically they're recurring, they're coming back. Just doing it just once isn't going to do the trick. For the.

[Ari Paparo]

And this might not be malicious. This could be all kinds of bots that are analytical bots, things like that, right?

[Guy Titanovich]

Yeah. I think the most important thing nowadays, especially with the future that's coming in with AI and AI agents and like, you won't book an appointment for the barber, you'll let your AI agent do it. You won't cancel your order on Amazon, you let the agent do it. So in this case and in the past as well, the most important thing is the ability to detect whether not just the user is a human being or not, but also whether the intent is malicious or not, whether the bot itself is a Google bot or a malicious bot. And we've always taken pride in the fact that we cannot just decipher whether a user is a human being or not, but can also decipher the intent, the identity. And with our deep subject matter expertise rooted in the marketing world, in the go to market world, we're also able to solve for use cases that are very specific for the customer journey itself.

[Ari Paparo]

Like what kind of specific use cases?

[Guy Titanovich]

For instance, inventory, click fraud, skewing your data and decision making.

[Ari Paparo]

How does it work for search where you don't have the ability to put say JavaScript in the ads?

[Guy Titanovich]

And I wish I had. And it's not just that, it's all the walled gardens. There's a reason why all the walled gardens, right?

[Ari Paparo]

How does it work for all the walled gardens?

[Guy Titanovich]

By the way, I think you might have been the person to coin the phrase, the term walled gardens.

[Ari Paparo]

No, I don't think so. I don't think that was me.

[Guy Titanovich]

But we've both used it quite a lot. So it's walled gardens, but they have great APIs. So basically, let's say a bot clicks on your ad on google search, on google.com visits your website. We sit there, we sit on I think over two and a half million domains globally and we see about 30 billion users interactions a week. And typically there's a huge network effect. So if we see a user come into customer A and detect that it's a non human user or fake user otherwise, then immediately we put them on the blacklist and do two things. One, again with the Google Search example, we ask Google to not charge our customer for that click. And two, we add that to a block list via an API with Google Search. Right. We also tag the user kind of like you would for retargeting but for negative targeting. So with an audience pixel and prevent them from ever coming to any of our websites, any of our customers websites.

[Ari Paparo]

Does Google have an API for asking for refunds on individual clicks?

[Guy Titanovich]

I'm not sure. I think we do it in an automated manner, but not necessarily through API.

[Ari Paparo]

I wish I had it. That would be nice. So with regard to e commerce, what about the argument that like bots aren't buying anything, so who cares, right? No one's good, the bot's not. If the bot has a credit card Then God bless, let them let the bot buy something. But if they don't have a credit card, who cares about the clicks and the fraud?

[Guy Titanovich]

Exactly. So historic. First of all, the bot does click an ad and that like cpc, that costs you money, but. And it also skews your decision making and your data. But put that aside. Your absolutely right. Except for now. Like have you played with ChatGPT operator for instance?

[Ari Paparo]

I have, but I've seen the demos.

[Guy Titanovich]

Yeah, yeah, I and I did both. It's nuts. It's very far from where it's going to be and it's very far from being as useful as I'd want it to be. But the point is bots, a lot of bots are like an AI agent, like JGT Operator is essentially a bot, anything AI is essentially a bot bot are now going to be and your best users, they are going to make purchases on our and acquisitions on our behalf of a real user's behalf. And so they will have credit cards and they will be making purchases. And now it's not just, you know, blocking the bots, it's exactly the opposite. You want to not just accept the buy, you want to optimize the visual experience for the bot or the AI agent to be able. And now this entire game gets way more complex. Like there's a $30 billion tan for the industry of identity in cybersecurity cyan like customer identity access management companies and like Okta and so on. And when you think about it, it's also kind of a philosophical question. But the topic of identity is going to be very different in the new world of AI agents and new bots and positive bots than it was in the past. Same has anything to buy mitigation. Now, in order to do your job properly, you need to understand whether Ari just logged in or whether it's ARI's AI agent and whether this AI agent claiming to be ARI's AI agent is legit working on behalf of Ari. It could even be that it's literally sitting locally on Ari's device. But that doesn't necessarily mean they operate on behalf of Ari. And in order to add value to sites in that kind of world, in that kind of reality, you need to have capabilities not just in deciphering whether a user is a human being or not, but also in deciphering whether the intent is malicious or benign, whether they're actually working on behalf of who they're saying they're working, whether they're on their device or it's a virus or Malware. And also, you need to understand the customer journey well enough in order to make all that decision making and integrate into the right places.

[Ari Paparo]

So what sort of actual metrics or useful insight do you give a CMO right now about this whole bot world? Like, what does the report look like?

[Guy Titanovich]

It's convoluted. It's very complex. We have two ways to give the data to the customer. One of them is literally throw all the raw data at them and they would make use of it any which way they'd like, integrate it into their platforms. And the other one is the dashboard of our platform. And we prefer option B, but most customers prefer option A.

[Ari Paparo]

Well, could I answer a question? How many AI shopping bots came to my website this month?

[Guy Titanovich]

Yeah, of course.

[Ari Paparo]

Okay. And like, what would I do with that information?

[Guy Titanovich]

That's a great question. So again, there's the question of now versus the question of what's going to happen with AI agents in a month or a year and so on. Now it's mostly a which version of my site do I let them see? Do I let them see the same version that I would let a human user access, or do I let them see an Optim AI agent optimized version? What is that?

[Ari Paparo]

Wait, hold on, let me stop you there. What is an AI optimized version of my website?

[Guy Titanovich]

Oh, no one knows. No one knows more than anything.

[Ari Paparo]

I just rewatched the Matrix this past weekend with my kids and it was like, you know, you just plug in something, it's like, I know kung fu. And I think it's pretty similar where you could, like, you could Download, you know, 100 gigabytes of data about your products to the AI and it'll have no problem with that.

[Guy Titanovich]

It's exactly that. It's exactly that. Theoretically. Currently it seems like some sort of an API first protocol where compute power for the AI agent wouldn't be wasted on processing graphics and so on and so forth. Whether that's going to be the case in a year, a month, a day, that's pretty much for Sam Altman to decide, right? No one really knows. So that's one thing, but it's better to know than to not know.

[Ari Paparo]

Secondly, is it another use case to say like, hey, let's exclude these sessions from our machine learning or our HubSpot or things like that.

[Guy Titanovich]

So. Yep, for two main reasons. One of them is resource saving and the other is security. And thank God for that, by the way, because otherwise we wouldn't be the big company that we are today. But on the security side of things, you know, you need to be able to eliminate the possibility of a cybercriminal from taking advantage of this new world. It's basically. Imagine in the physical world you were a bank.

[Ari Paparo]

Right.

[Guy Titanovich]

And criminals can just use robots to rob the bank. It's a perfect crime.

[Ari Paparo]

That's a good idea. Yeah, you should do that.

[Guy Titanovich]

First of all. Yes, that's my beat. When that's surprising.

[Ari Paparo]

No one has done this yet.

[Guy Titanovich]

Exactly. Oh, wait for it, wait for it. And in the digital world, you can.

[Ari Paparo]

Just mug people on the street with robots. Like why are we waiting?

[Guy Titanovich]

Exactly. Again, that's my backup plan. You're more than welcome to join me. I'm looking for a co founder. But secondly, in the digital world, it's exactly the world we're heading into. So it's just a perfect crime, a perfect attack vector in the world of gen AI and specifically AI agents enables that if I want to log into your bank account and I have your login access and I'm not saying this theoretically I do, I genuinely have your login access to your bank account. Sure.

[Ari Paparo]

There's nothing in there, it's fine.

[Guy Titanovich]

And. Oh great. So and, and I want to use a proxy to mask my, my real identity, which is how you commit a crime. Basically. I would like. There's nothing better than using that AI agent in order to committing that crime and having some sort of a proxy. It's very difficult both to prevent and to unmask knowing that I'm really behind this crime. So this is the world we're going into. It's called account takeover and it's been there since the Internet has been there. But now it's going to be such more, so much more of a lucrative attack vector for criminals to use. Secondly, in terms of resource abuse. So you know, you're currently probably no one knows better than Ari than you what a tag manager system is and Google tag manager and so on and so forth. An average site has about 300 third party tools running at every given point on the site or on the app. Typically most of them, if not all of them, are marketing tools.

[Ari Paparo]

Right.

[Guy Titanovich]

Like even let's abuse.

[Ari Paparo]

Including your code, right?

[Guy Titanovich]

Yeah. And your code. No, I'm kidding.

[Ari Paparo]

Well, I don't have code anymore. I'm just a podcaster.

[Guy Titanovich]

But you used to. And imagine your chat support widget, the chat support widget if they're rogue or if they were compromised and I'm talking about any single tool out of your third party tools and first of all you don't necessarily want to run a chat support widget for AI agent users. You're just wasting money and time here. Secondly, if the chat support widget is, or any One of the 300 marketing tools is compromised, then they have access to the pii, to the data that the user is inputting. And now if it's going to be an AI agent, then you can even inject a malicious prompt into that agent. And this is a third party. Imagine Joe from Oregon comes into Expedia.com to book a plane ticket and feeds in or the AI agent of the Oregonian. They feed in the credit card number, the passport number, the address, a ton of other details. And the chat support widget has been compromised. They now have access to all those pii, all those details. But now with an AI agent user, they can also. The chat support widget can also inject malicious malware into the AI agent and theoretically make that AI agent do stuff on Joe's device, hand over the password file and so on, so on.

[Ari Paparo]

Well, the two AI should, should get together, go out on a date or something. So, so let's just briefly cover a couple bases about, about your product specifically. So the Implementation is a JavaScript on the website. It's kind of the baseline implementation. And then that allows you to both do the detection as well as the content manipulation, correct?

[Guy Titanovich]

Yeah, the mitigation.

[Ari Paparo]

Yeah, the mitigation. Okay, and what's the entry level like pricing or what size company is appropriate for your solution?

[Guy Titanovich]

The vast majority of our revenue, I'd say about 90% comes from enterprise customers. And for us, an enterprise is typically paying us anywhere between 20k a year to $2 million a year. But we also have a self serve platform for small businesses. We have about 15,000 customers there that are literally SMBs. And they're paying us anywhere between a thousand bucks a year to I think $12,000 a year.

[Ari Paparo]

Right. And what's the immediate payoff? If I was a small, like a Shopify merchant doing in the five, six figures a month in merchant value, what do I get immediately when I sign up for you?

[Guy Titanovich]

The first thing. Again for an SMB, not necessarily for an enterprise, the first thing, the biggest value you get is literally the ability to save about 10 to 20% of your click of your CPC spend.

[Ari Paparo]

Okay, that makes sense. That sounds very valuable. Okay, let's talk about lightning round. So relatively quick questions, quick answers. What is your number one competitive advantage?

[Guy Titanovich]

The ability to marry identity versus human unhuman.

[Ari Paparo]

All right, and what's the biggest barrier that you have.

[Guy Titanovich]

We've basically invented the new industry, so market education, right?

[Ari Paparo]

Why won't the big guys like Google, Amazon, et cetera do this?

[Guy Titanovich]

They are doing it, but they have a disadvantage. They're actually doing a far better job than most would assume. But they're a sitting duck. It's not a moving target. And a sitting duck can't ever mitigate everything, right?

[Ari Paparo]

What do you mean by that? What do you mean by them being a sitting duck?

[Guy Titanovich]

Google.com, youTube.com, facebook.com, instagram, they literally everyone knows where they are. And the attacker in cybersecurity always has the advantage over the defender because the defender is a sitting duck, whereas the attacker is typically a moving one.

[Ari Paparo]

I see. Interesting. Okay, last question. If check was an animal, what animal would it be? Lion's our most common answer.

[Guy Titanovich]

Yeah, and I have no idea why I said that, other than megalomania. But yeah, okay.

[Ari Paparo]

Lion because of megalomania. Megalomania. I can't say that word. But yes, okay, guy from Czech AI thank you so much for being here.

[Guy Titanovich]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Ari Paparo]

Thank you for listening to the marketecture podcast. New episodes come out every Friday, and an insightful vendor interview is published each Monday. You can subscribe to our library of hundreds of executive interviews at marketecture tv. You can also sign up for free for our weekly newsletter with my original strategic insights on the week's news at News Market tv. And if you're feeling social, we operate a vibrant Slack community that you can apply to [e-mail].