Oxford-backed startup Circadian has received a grant of almost £70,000 from Innovate UK to help reduce the pain fraudsters inflict upon online business.

Innovate UK is the nation’s innovation agency, driving science and technology innovations to grow the economy.

Donal Carville, CEO of Circadian, said: “We would like to thank Innovate UK for this grant which will go towards building out our technology. Together with the investment by Oxford Seed Fund at Saïd Business School earlier in the summer we are now in a great position to develop the business."

"Online Fraud Detection is a competitive business, but we’re trying to take it in a different direction, making life just that bit easier for the ecommerce sector."

OFD delivers real-time confidence signalling to Enterprises as their customers present with credentials. But, from our perspective, the medium is the message: credentials are too easy to replicate; it's their presentation that matters. And that's what the Quill service does: it learns from, and begins recognising your behavioural signature each time you log on to the business.

As mobile further drives the shape of anonymous communication, innovation will be key and Quill will allow businesses to keep pace with the ever-expanding data exhaust generated by the latest sensors embedded in devices.

"The Quill service is perfect for eCommerce enterprises, in particular mcommerce, suffering from online fraud. Fraud's become cleaner these past years as the bad guys perfect their access to your credentials - and card not payment fraud (the largest fraud type by a long way) is at an all time high. Nobody, barring the man on the moon, thinks this pressure is going to change any time soon."

Quill was developed after Donal read about yet another data breach (1.5bn records went missing last year alone!), and finding himself unable to progress through all stages of the grief cycle, decided to take a cyber gamble.

"The wager's this: no matter how clever the cybersecurity industry's safeguards, credentials will continue to be stolen for the simple reason that they are mighty useful. Quill takes that as a given ("acceptance" at last!), and instead focuses on making the use of those stolen credentials worthless."