Start-up Pramana plays Web site bot-spotter

23.04.2010
Start-up Pramana wants to be the bot-spotter for your Web site, watching to see whether actions are initiated by real people or nasty remotely controlled by spammers or hackers.

Pramana has a free service called BotAlert that can report suspected bot traffic on a site. It also recently launched a paid service, BotBlock, that requires embedding a small amount of code in Web pages to detect and block bot-related actions, according to David Crowder, CEO of Pramana.

"Often on a Web site it's not clear what is bad behavior from a bot and what is human," Crowder says. He points out that automated bot processes can do everything from generating fraudulent content and spam to scraping data to grab content.

Pramana is positioning BotBlock, which ranges from $19.99 to $299 per month depending on the level of transactions on Web sites, as an alternative to the CAPTCHA tool mechanism commonly used to fight automated and unwanted processes such as . BotBlock is designed to respond to bot activity by either blocking it or feeding it false data.

Pramana was founded by Merrick Furst, Sanjay Sehgal and Guru Rajan in 2007. Like another botnet-busting start-up called , Pramana has its roots in research done at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The Alpharetta, Ga., start-up, now with seven employees, has received $2.4 million in funding, much of it from angel investors.