The market is recognizing that FunCaptcha really is a better CAPTCHA alternative and it feels great to earn that credibility.

FunCaptcha was founded in January 2013, with the aim of providing elegant solutions to website security problems. We’re now protecting over 30,000 websites from hundreds of millions of bot attacks each month and are the only company 100% dedicated to improving CAPTCHA security, conversion and monetization.

Our founders were previously game developers and worked with companies like Atari & Microsoft. We have offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles & Brisbane, Australia.

What is a CAPTCHA?
CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. They are commonly presented in a challenge-response format and used extensively online to verify human users and protect websites from automated programs, or ‘bots’.
Why are CAPTCHA alternatives necessary?
The type of CAPTCHA that most people are familiar with uses frustrating, difficult to read words, which must be typed correctly to pass the test. However as optical character recognition technology has improved, it has rendered all text CAPTCHAs insecure – watch our video explaining how bots get through text CAPTCHAs.
Other CAPTCHA alternatives have also proven to be insecure, or have less than satisfactory conversion rates, meaning too many humans fail the test and give up on your website! But FunCaptcha taps into the innate human ability to recognize the subtle qualities of things like animals and people – something inherently difficult for machines to do. This makes FunCaptcha the most secure, best converting CAPTCHA alternative available. And due the value of the engagement with guaranteed human users, it can also generate high CPM advertising revenue via programmatic ads or intelligent insights from gamified surveys.

BusinessInterviews.com:  What inspired you to launch your business?

Kevin Gosschalk: We’ve all been a victim to the horrible experience that is text CAPTCHA on the internet – those squiggly words you’re asked to type in order to prove that you’re a human. The irony is that these solutions don’t even work, they’re not secure. Bots can automatically bypass text CAPTCHAs as machines are much better than humans at deciphering text, using solutions such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). We identified better methods to determine whether a user is human and launched FunCaptcha in 2013 after pitching the idea during a Startup Weekend event.

BusinessInterviews.com:  Do you have any recent success stories that you’d like to share with our readers?

Kevin Gosschalk: FunCaptcha has proven to be the worlds most secure CAPTCHA. We have clients who have used all of the alternatives, including the new “No CAPTCHA” reCAPTCHA and they simply didn’t work to stop automated bypass. Bot authors have figured out how to bypass these CAPTCHAs automatically, even reCAPTCHA’s product manager stated they could bypass reCAPTCHA with 99.95% efficiency from technology used by the Google Maps team. All other puzzle solutions on the market have obvious security flaws that have prevented them from achieving market uptake. FunCaptcha is the only CAPTCHA provider that offers first class user experience and also completely stops bot spam – and our customers are continually confirming this fact. Often with a sense of extreme relief!

BusinessInterviews.com:  What issue does your core product help solve and how so?

Kevin Gosschalk: Primarily our focus is preventing automated abuse on the internet, such as forum spam, preventing ticket scalping or vote/signup abuse. FunCaptcha has three core focuses:

1. Stopping abuse/bots/spam.
2. Ensuring human users don’t leave your website – via good UX & conversion.
3. Adding a new revenue stream by way of advertising that is proven to not impact conversion at all.

We take pride in being the only company 100% dedicated to improving CAPTCHA both for the publisher by way of better security and revenue, but also for end users by ensuring an easier experience.

We provide FunCaptcha for free and will even pay your website to use it, by way of monetizing what we call “The Moment of CAPTCHA”. This is our patent-pending method of verifying humans before we serve an advertisement, which protects advertisers from fraud and boosts their ROI considerably, which greatly improves CPM revenue to publishers. The ads themselves are simple static ads, nothing flashy and we’ve proven that they have zero impact on user conversion. We have proven that showing an advertisement actually improves conversion in some cases!

BusinessInterviews.com:  What has been your biggest challenge as a business owner and how have you met that challenge?

Kevin Gosschalk: The biggest challenge for us is market education. Most people don’t realize that a bad CAPTCHA won’t work at all to stop spam and that some of the most recommended methods such as ‘Honeypots’ only work until you become a target—at which point they will fall over instantly. The fact that text solutions are so prevalent in the market has lead people to believe that is the go-to method when a CAPTCHA is required. Even Internet professionals are not sufficiently educated about CAPTCHA issues and are unknowingly subjecting their users to a poor experience that isn’t even secure.

There is currently a stigma attached to CAPTCHA, but we’re working hard to changing that by providing a better solution – because CAPTCHA is still a necessity online.

BusinessInterviews.com:  What’s the most exciting thing on the horizon for you/your Company?

Kevin Gosschalk:

• There are some big brands that love our technology and are in the final stages of adoption. We can’t mention specifics until the deals are finalized and live, but now is an exciting time. The market is recognizing that FunCaptcha really is a better CAPTCHA alternative and it feels great to earn that credibility.
• We’re also developing more tools that leverage guaranteed human verification and engagement to provide value to publishers and advertisers via both insights and inventory.

BusinessInterviews.com:  How do your competitors view you?

Kevin Gosschalk: The other CAPTCHAs aren’t really doing what they’re designed to do right now, so I imagine that they don’t like the fact we’re actually secure AND convert human users at a much higher rate.  But to be honest we don’t really concern ourselves with other CAPTCHA providers, as they are all so limited compared to what we offer. Our issue is educating the market, not our competitors.