An interview session with Real Time Fraud Detection Wizards – Founders of ThirdWatch

Thirdwatch is an Artificial Intelligence driven company based in Gurgaon started by two tech wizards – Shashank Agarwal and Adarsh Jain. Lets read more about the company and how they are helping to detect real-time frauds in the e-commerce market. 

• Please share about your company?

ThirdWatch is an Artificial Intelligence driven startup based in Gurgaon. Thirdwatch aims to reduce fraud that occurs in digital transactions through AI and machine learning. Its platform Mitra prevents fraud in digital, banking and e-commerce transactions in real time by integrating AI. Its system captures 200+ parameters and flags each transaction in real time, as red or green. It generates a risk score also which defines riskiness of the transaction. These days companies have little choice and fewer tools to prevent Fraud- they consider it as a ‘cost of doing business’. Most firms resort to blunt static rules like blocking all International credit cards, not delivering to certain pin codes and cities, or capping the order size. These macro-level rules cause more harm than they do good, as many genuine orders get lost and customer relationships are damaged. ThirdWatch has solved this challenge by replacing manual rules with an AI platform, Mitra which performs automatic screening of all orders and does not reject genuine orders.

• Who are the founders and co-founders of the company?

Thirdwatch was started in April 2016 by Shashank Agarwal and Adarsh Jain, who had the first-hand experience of the issues e-commerce businesses face.     Shashank Agarwal (Co-Founder) has been a programmer since the age of 15. He started his first mobile application company at the age of 18 and has been working as an Ethical hacker for over a decade. At just the age of 28, he has a patent pending on Uninstall tracking and holds vast experience in technology innovations. Adarsh Jain, (Co-Founder) is a 36-years-old IIT BHU (2004 batch) graduate with 12+ years of experience in the technology domain. He has been a part of the Big Data ecosystem and startups since 2008. Adarsh has previously co-founded a location and mobile-based credit card security startup in 2008. With an extensive background and experience, he holds multiple Patents in the technology domain.

• Please share the complete journey about the company? When have you started, how and where?

A couple of years back, Adarsh was trying to order a TV for his father who resides in Greater Noida, from one of the top 2 e-commerce sites in India. However, the website refused to confirm the order despite being prepaid. When he ordered the same item to his Gurgaon address, it came through. After digging deeper into this issue, we found that fraud/abuse is a colossal problem in e-commerce, costing online businesses huge revenue losses. To deal with the issue, companies have to induce broad rules like blocking certain pin codes/cities/states and/or international credit from ordering, which unfortunately affect genuine users as well. Given their experience in building Big Data mobile analytics system, they felt confident that they can solve this problem by using AI and machine learning. Adarsh and Shashank have previously worked together and know each other from past 6 years. In their last assignment, they created a Mobile analytics system ROCQ, which was a huge success in terms of clients and multiple acquisition offers. They have also filed several patents, which made them confident enough to start ThirdWatch. They have raised funding when they were just two members of the team and they are confident that this team will grow at a tremendous rate.

• What role does it play in E-commerce industry? How can e-commerce businessman flag risky transactions and prevent loss?

Fraud has become a common nuisance for the entire ecosystem of e-commerce which comprises of merchants, marketplace aggregator, and customer. E-commerce sellers are constantly facing different kinds of frauds and abuses, like RTOs, chargeback frauds, and promo code abuse among others. Smart e-commerce businesses rely on technology to find the best fraud prevention solution for them and save a large amount of revenue and inventory that would otherwise be lost to frauds. By helping prevent fraud, ThirdWatch helps everyone in that ecosystem, especially small e-commerce players who are sometimes forced to shut shop due to losses caused by fraud. With a strict NDA and Confidentiality policy, ThirdWatch guarantees complete safeguard of client’s data.

• Who are your customers? And have supplied to anyone? What is the feedback?

They help especially e-commerce players. Their clients have provided a positive as they believe in Mitra and its results. They are now expanding their services to companies which suffer from e-commerce frauds across India and East Asia. With a foreseen surge in the e-commerce business scale in India, ThirdWatch asks e-commerce platforms to experience how Mitra works. They ask businesses to try their product once to see a visible reduction in the number of RTOs, returns, and refund as Mitra will change the way business is conducted over the internet and make it a safer place for sellers.

• What are your future plans?

Being a SaaS Startup, ThirdWatch enjoys good margins on each transaction and aim to breakeven in next 18-24 months. The startup will be going for series A fundraising in a couple of months & will be raising around 5-6 Million USD.

• Message to your customers and viewers

For every customer, Thirdwatch has always been a profit center and never a cost center. E-Commerce companies can avail a free 2 months trial, and can actually validate the benefit we are offering themselves. You can reach them by following social profiles as well: