Autohost closes pre-seed funding round

Canada: Guest screening platform Autohost has announced that it has secured pre-seed funding from seed-stage venture capital firm Mistral Venture Partners.

Autohost said that it would use the funding to strengthen its teams across sales, customer success, product and software development as it seeks to scale up and grow further.

Raif Barbaros, partner at Mistral Venture Partners, said: “Autohost’s deep market insights of property managers and impressive traction caught our attention, but once we spoke to some of their customers and heard how critical Autohost was to their business, we had to get involved.

“We are excited to support the team in their efforts to get the company to the next level,” added Barbaros.

Co-founded in 2019 by Ela Mezhiborsky and Anton Zilberberg, Autohost specialises in identity verification and fraud prevention solutions for the sharing economy. The company seeks to protect against chargebacks and fraud by using machine learning and behavioural checks to evaluate the risk level of transactions and reservations for hotels, Airbnb listings, marketplaces, rental companies, and other online businesses.

Mezhiborsky and Zilberberg initially offered out luxury accommodations, however, a pattern of bad behaviour displayed by their guests, including a criminal gang hijacking one of their properties and bringing in illicit drugs and automatic weapons, prompted them to start Autohost with cybersecurity expert Roy Firestein.

Co-founder and CEO, Roy Firestein, said: “We are thrilled to have Mistral Venture Partners lead our pre-seed round. “We are profitable and have bootstrapped the company to millions in ARR without external investors, but Mistral’s experience and resources will be invaluable as we continue to scale the company.”