Sift is a fraud prevention company for online businesses. It helps merchants, marketplaces and fintechs stop payment fraud, account takeover and fake account creation as they happen, without turning away genuine customers at checkout or sign-up.
Everything runs on the Sift Platform, where the same machine learning models and signals shared across the Sift network inform every decision.
At A Glance
| Vendor | Sift |
|---|---|
| Category | Fraud prevention and account protection |
| Identities covered | Consumer and customer accounts |
| Deployment | APIs, the Sift Console and partner integrations |
| Customers | Patreon, ChowNow, Turo, PayMongo, Link Money |
| Founded | 2011 |
| Market classification | Identity Verification |
What Sift Does
Fraud rarely stays in one place. An attacker who takes over an account often goes on to make fraudulent payments with it, and a reported 42% of account takeover victims also suffer downstream payment fraud. Sift treats the two problems together: it scores logins, sign-ups and transactions with shared models, so evidence gathered at one step informs the decision at the next. The aim is to approve good customers quickly, add friction only when risk is high and cut the manual review load on fraud teams.
Products
Payment Protection
Payment Protection makes a fraud decision on each transaction in real time. It is built for online sellers that lose money both to chargebacks and to good orders wrongly declined, and uses machine learning models trained on payment fraud to return a decision in under 150 ms. Used together with Account Defense, it brings a reported gain of up to 1.6% in accuracy and up to 10% more accepted orders.
Account Defense
Account Defense protects the customer account itself. It detects takeover attempts at login, blocks fake account creation and applies dynamic friction, such as an extra verification step, only where a session looks risky. It is meant for consumer platforms where stolen or fabricated accounts lead to abuse and lost revenue.
Sift Score API, Console And Services
Teams that run their own risk engine can call the Sift Score API and add Sift risk signals to their existing models. The Sift Console is where analysts investigate users and handle manual review. Professional Services support implementation, workflow audits, model tuning and labelling.
Fraud Attack Defense Suite
This suite applies AI agents to the work of a fraud team. The Attack Detection Agent finds and assesses coordinated attacks and helps analysts respond, with a reported cut in response time from days to minutes. Further agents review cases, investigate users and keep review workflows tuned.
How It Works
Customers send events through APIs or through Sift Connect, a catalogue of one-click and low-code connectors that includes a Salesforce Commerce Cloud cartridge and payment service provider integrations. Decisions come back in real time. The platform then works in four stages.
| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
| Ingest and enrich | Customer and event data is collected, enriched with intelligence from across the Sift network and assembled into digital profiles, so a user who is new to one business may already have a history elsewhere. |
| Evaluate risk | Activity is scored by custom, industry and global models. |
| Decide and act | Responses are automated, and friction is applied where risk is high. |
| Optimise and learn | Reporting, case management and workflow analysis reduce the share of events that need manual review. |
Identities And Systems Covered
| Customer accounts | Logins and account changes on consumer platforms, checked for takeover |
|---|---|
| New sign-ups | Account creation, screened for fake or fabricated accounts |
| Payments | Online transactions on ecommerce, marketplace and fintech platforms, scored for fraud |
Company Background
| Founded | 2011 |
|---|---|
| Leadership | Jason Tan (Founder and Executive Chairman), Marc Friend (Chief Executive Officer) |
| Funding | $50 million round in April 2021 led by Insight Partners with Union Square Ventures and Stripes, at a valuation above $1 billion |
| Customers | More than 700 brands |
| Patents | More than 40 |
Note: This overview is compiled from Sift’s publicly available information as of 3 November 2026. It is provided for information only. NHI Mgmt Group does not endorse any vendor, and nothing on this page represents the opinions of NHI Mgmt Group.