LegitScript and Fluxguard announced that they are joining forces through the form of an acquisition by LegitScript. By bringing LegitScript’s Merchant Monitoring, Platform Monitoring, and Investigative Analysis solutions together with Fluxguard’s AI-powered Website Change Detection solution, the combined organization will be well positioned to serve the constantly evolving needs of risk and compliance teams across the globe.
In the following Q&A, Fluxguard co-founder and CEO Peter Bray talks more about his journey in creating Fluxguard and how he sees the solution’s ability to monitor website changes working with LegitScript’s technology.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your background.
I've been doing entrepreneurial things my entire life. That passion for creating has been a big part of my journey — starting up different products, thinking through how we can get product market fit, and creating effective solutions.
I think what’s unique about Fluxgard is that we are a bootstrapped company and as a result have grown by leaning into the customers and keeping our focus on engineering as our primary core competency.
How did you identify the need for the solution Fluxguard offers?
As far back as my college days, it dawned on me that so much of the early web was lost. We don’t know what’s happened there because when things change, they just vanish. And it's not like there's a paper record or a newspaper that you can go back to and record aside from the Internet Archive, which is a bit slow and clunky.
So, this is what led to Fluxguard. It was realizing, “Oh, there's this changing sea of information out there. And we only have a glimpse of it.” Live content is only the tip of the iceberg, and it’s usually not a very accurate picture for many situations.
What was the original use case for your solution?
What originally got me thinking about web change monitoring products was politics and how all the different candidates’ websites would change. From the primary to the general election, their messaging changes dramatically. I was thinking this was going to be a solution for journalists. In fact, ProPublica was one of our first customers for doing this.
What emerged from it, though, is that we discovered that these changes were critically important for many businesses from a third-party risk and regulatory perspective because aspects of website change can introduce dramatic risk. So, if they're not keeping abreast of all the different regulations that they're subject to, or they're not keeping track of their own digital portfolios to make sure they comply with their internal compliance, external regulations, and market happenings, then companies open themselves up to massive risk exposure.
Who is your core customer base and how are they using your solution?
Fluxguard offers broad-based web change monitoring, and so we get all of these interesting different use cases on how our solution is used. For monitoring external websites, it is extremely valuable for regulatory and competitive intelligence. For example, major pharmaceutical companies need to make sure they’re tracking label changes, which is extremely complex because it is tightly regulated and can change between countries, states, and even local counties. Likewise, think about OSHA requirements, health and safety rules, food safety law — so many companies have to stay abreast of the different changes that are happening in so many regulatory spaces that it is difficult to track it all.
But Fluxguard is useful for internal monitoring of web properties as well, right?
Yeah, the most common internal use case is what I classify as brand safety. That’s where companies are looking to detect changes on their owned digital portfolio. They may, for example, be looking for defacement, whether intentional or inadvertent, of a webpage. We call that “defacement monitoring” and it helps to protect the company and their customer experience.
Another example is monitoring for inadvertent leaks of confidential information. Large companies have huge digital portfolios managed by hundreds or thousands of editors, and it’s not uncommon for protected information to prematurely go out. We can help monitor for that and catch it before it is publicly discovered. Those are just a few use cases that Fluxguard is being used for today.
The value of your technology to our clients seems apparent: Payment processors need to monitor merchant websites for problematic changes, and e-commerce marketplaces want to know if their sellers make changes to their listings. Tell us why you think the relationship between LegitScript and Fluxguard makes sense.
Honestly, it felt like a really great match from the beginning. We're both here in Oregon, and we’re both operating in generally the same space. Our company has been incrementally growing in really exciting directions. But we see these opportunities on the horizon, especially with the dawn of generative AI and about how crawling the web is a key input to all of that. We’re at this juncture where we see these opportunities we can lean into and really explode. So when we encountered LegitScript, we saw this unique opportunity to accelerate that vision while complementing the particular angles that you’re focused on. I’m really excited to help bring that vision to life.