PALO ALTO, CA, Impermium today announced a Series-A financing round of $8 million, which will fuel the build out of the company's global service for fighting social web spam. The round was led by Highland Capital Partners, with participation from existing investors including The Social+Capital Partnership and Freestyle Capital.

"Social web spam is the biggest threat to the growth of social media and participatory content on the Internet today. If it is not managed effectively, it directly impacts a company's bottom line," said Andy Miller, Impermium's newest board member and general partner at Highland Capital Partners. "We invested in Impermium because it is first to market with core technology and a global defense network that can detect and eliminate social web spam at a level of efficiency that no other security vendor or in-house team can achieve today."

Impermium has gained significant momentum since its founding just over a year ago. During its beta phase, the company protected more than 300 million social web transactions in pilot projects spanning social networks, media companies and top consumer web sites with significant social media engagement. As an example, Impermium is currently providing anti-web spam and fraud/abuse support to DISQUS, a social media commenting platform which serves 600 million monthly users and is deployed across some of the world's largest media sites including CNN, The Atlantic, Fox News and Time Magazine.

The Social Web Spam Problem is Escalating
Five years ago, social web spam was practically nonexistent. But in October, an industry report indicated that 91 percent of users have experienced spam on a social network. Meanwhile, e-mail based spam has remained flat - and in some cases even decreased - over the past 24 months. Spammers and cybercriminials are causing much more damage on the social web because far more people are exposed to a given posting, and users trust scams and ploys much more readily when they appear to come from members of their social networks.

"When I was at Facebook, I witnessed, first hand, the exponential growth of social spam and the difficulty in staying ahead of it," said Chamath Palihapitiya, founder of The Social+Capital Partnership, which led Impermium's seed financing round. "Every site across the web, whether it's a multi-billion-dollar media company or a mom and pop web site, now needs a service that can combat social spam. We've seen companies try to fight this themselves and burn significant amounts of resources, with no end in sight."

In the coming months, Impermium will expand its engineering, data analytics, sales and marketing departments. It is currently seeking individuals with experience in machine learning, analytics, and in building and marketing Internet-scale software platforms. For more information, please visit the company's job page.

About Highland Capital Partners
Highland Capital Partners was founded with the mission of helping great people build great companies. With over $3 billion of committed capital and offices in Menlo Park, Boston, Geneva and Shanghai, Highland has invested in and worked to create such firms as Ask Jeeves, Avid Technology, CheckFree, Conor Medsystems, Coremetrics, lululemon athletica, Lycos, MapQuest, Navic Networks, Ocular Networks, P.A. Semi, Quattro Wireless, Qihoo 360, Quigo, Starent Networks, Sybase, Telica, Vertica and VistaPrint. For more information, visit Highland's web site at www.hcp.com.

About Impermium
Impermium was founded in 2010 by former Yahoo! "Spam Czar" Mark Risher, Vish Ramarao, and Naveen Jamal. Previously, the trio led the anti-spam and security group at Yahoo! Mail, where they drastically reduced spam and fraud for Yahoo! customers. The company's investors are Accel Partners, Archimedes Capital, AOL Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Greylock Discovery Fund, Highland Capital Partners, Morado Ventures, and The Social+Capital Partnership. Follow the company on Twitter @impermium or the Allied Front blog.