Israel’s Cheq Acquires Click-Fraud Prevention Company ClickCease

Israeli cybersecurity company Cheq has acquired Tel Aviv-based click-fraud prevention company ClickCease, the company announced on Wednesday.

The move is set to boost Cheq’s presence in the PPC / SEM (pay-per-click, search engine marketing) space, while expanding the company’s reach to small-and-medium business advertisers.

Founded in 2016, Cheq developed AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to combat ad fraud and ensure brand-safe environments for online advertisers. The company offers cybersecurity-driven ad verification to big brand advertisers and media agencies across the globe. Cheq has offices in New York, Tokyo (Japan), Shanghai (China), and Tel Aviv (Israel.)

The addition of ClickCease opens the door to tens of millions of mid-to-small size advertisers who spend money on search opitmization, a statement from the company said.

ClickCease was founded in 2014 by Yuval Haimov and Ilan Missulawin with the aim of mitigating invalid ad-clicks driven by botnets, web-crawlers, click-farms and other sources. The self-funded company services over 5,000 clients worldwide and is the leading player in the space today.

“We’re very excited to be joining the Cheq family,” said Yuval Haimov, Founder and CEO of ClickCease. “Their technological infrastructure and strong position in the market will help us achieve even greater scale and expand our market even faster. We’re very proud of what we’ve achieved thus far in becoming the leading player in click-fraud prevention. Joining Cheq will only help solidify our market-leading position and will create exciting new growth opportunities. We’d like to thank Cheq’s board for believing in us and look forward to being part of something so big.”

“As our ad-verification offerings continue to expand across all marketing channels, from display and video, to OTT, 3D gaming and Search, the addition of ClickCease will give us traction with mid-to-small size advertisers, a huge and largely untapped market in the space. This will enable Cheq to remain focused on enterprise clients while driving growth in new areas,” said Cheq founder and CEO Guy Tytunovich.

ClickCease is “a fantastic company with a massive client base and almost endless growth potential,” he added, “With Cheq’s robust resources and technology, the company will be able to hit far more ambitious targets in a much shorter amount of time.”