New appointment brings up 100 employee milestone and follows the fraud fighters’ recent Series A investment round and launch into the US and Indonesia

SEON, the fraud fighters, has responded to a year that has seen both digital crime and interest in their products skyrocket by hiring Otto Toth, former CTO of digital news outlet The Huffington Post and SVP and Chief Mobile Innovation Officer at AOL. This key strategic appointment means SEON has now passed the 100 employee milestone in a period of rapid growth for the fraud fighters since it secured €10 million (USD 12 million) Series A investment earlier this year and opened new regional offices in Austin, USA and Jakarta, Indonesia.

With the recent surge in online crime, there has never been greater need for SEON’s artificial intelligence-driven ‘fraud fighting’ tools, and with new customers there is a need for a best-in-class internal structure to not only support higher loads but to increase the pace of new product releases. This is why SEON went looking for top-tier talent and found Otto Toth.

Over a 25-year career in tech, Otto developed the first iPhone and iPad app for the New York Times, built the prototype of AOL’s Content HUB and served as a board member of Verizon Media’s Patch.com and StudioNow programmes. He served as Chief Technology Officer of The Huffington Post during a major international expansion, building a scalable content management system and a data migration for the huge amount of content on the site.

At SEON, Otto will be in charge of all people-related aspects in the company’s engineering team. Additionally, he will be in charge of compliance, security and coordinating with external partners to improve SEON’s infrastructure, ensuring its solutions scale to even more customers. Commenting on his appointment and new project, Otto Toth, VP of Engineering at SEON, said: “I wanted to utilise my expertise at a young, fast-growing company with an excellent product and vision for the future, providing opportunities for the talented Hungarian engineers working on world-class projects with the latest technologies without the need to leave the country.”

He added: “I am a builder who loves to contribute to all aspects of the product and the growth of SEON. I believe that my experience is a great asset that will help to achieve our goals and take the company to the next level.”

Tamas Kadar, Co-Founder and CEO at SEON, said: “SEON has been a huge success and is attracting the very best talent internationally. As former CTO of Huffington Post, Otto is a testament to this, and we’re proud to have him along on the ride to our further success.”

SEON is a Budapest-based company founded in 2017 by college friends Tamas Kadar and Bence Jendruszak. Since its founding it has developed into a significant player in the online fraud screening space and was recently the recipient of the largest Series A funding round in Hungary’s history after being invested in by Creandum, a venture capital firm that has previously backed Spotify, Klarna and Bolt.

The company has offices in Budapest, London, Austin and Jakarta and due to significant growth in the past year has recently partnered with VCC Live, IDVerifact and Connected Data to bring new capabilities to their two core products, Intelligence Tool and Sense Platform.