clean.io debuts tool for ecommerce merchants, signs new partnership for anti-malvertising product

It was a busy week for clean.io. The Baltimore cybersecurity security company went to number one on Product Hunt with a new tool centered on protection in ecommerce, and signed a partnership for its initial product that’s designed to stop malvertising.

On March 15, cleanCART was the #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, the national site which allows users to check out and vote for new tech. It marked a splashy debut for the company’s recently launched second product, which is focused around offering protection for ecommerce merchants.

BIG NEWS: cleanCART is LIVE on Product Hunt today🎉

We would be grateful for your support and feedback 🙏

To learn more, check out https://t.co/l2r36aPD02 #producthunt #ecommerce

— clean.io (@Clean_io) March 15, 2021

As clean.io CEO Matt Gillis and VP of marketing Kathleen Booth told us recently, cleanCART is designed to prevent coupon extensions like Honey and CapitalOne Shopping from auto-injecting discount codes at checkout. These extensions scrape discount codes and share them with others that use the extension, making codes that are designed to be limited use available to anyone.

“On the surface it seems great because people are saving money,” Booth said. However, “it can do a lot of damage to the merchants.”

Among the downsides: lost revenue, and a weakened ability to measure marketing effectiveness for merchants.

The product launches at a time when ecommerce, an already growing segment, has been supercharged by the pandemic, when online ordering was the norm retailers sought to make more goods available online. On hearing from merchants about their pain points, clean.io applied its foundational technology that can analyze and prevent unwanted JavaScript from executing on a site at run-time. In this case, that code is coming from the extensions. Consumers can still manually enter codes that they receive, so coupons are still allowed. But it’s the automatic injection that the tool is preventing.

“For us, it’s about giving those retailers a chance in this new world that we’re entering,” Booth said.

Currently, the product is available to Shopify Plus users.

As it expanded with a new market, there was also some news around the company’s first product a couple days later: clean.io signed a partnership with mobile advertising company Kargo. As a result, Kargo will integrate cleanAD, the clean.io product that prevents ads with malware from running.

“The programmatic advertising ecosystem is built on trust. Premium publishers rely on Kargo to deliver safe, high quality mobile ads in order to maximize monetization and safeguard end-users,” Gillis said in a statement. “Our technology offers the most sophisticated buyers of anti-malware technology like Kargo an additional layer of protection for both their publishers and buyers.”

clean.io, which earned the top spot on Technical.ly’s RealLIST Startups 2020, has been building after raising $5 million in August. With the two tools now available, the Brewers Hill-based company is positioning itself as a platform company in the area of digital engagement security. The common thread? Tools that protect against unwanted third-party code, while allowing businesses to protect revenue.