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Ten years in device intelligence is a big deal — especially in fraud prevention, where, as clichéd as it sounds, the only constant is change. And this week, in addition to celebrating over a decade of device intelligence, we’re also celebrating a record quarter in ARR growth at Fingerprint and the formation of our Customer Advisory Board!
In 2012, when my co-founder and CTO, Valentin Vasilyev, launched FingerprintJS, the source-available (formerly open-source) version of Fingerprint, using browser and device signals to spot fraudsters was a wild idea. Device intelligence was unheard of in the industry. Now, you’d be missing out on valuable signals if you didn’t include it in your fraud prevention stack.
Our device intelligence powers everything from login security to payment fraud detection, using our 20+ Smart Signals to quietly flag high-risk devices, bad bots, and suspicious visitors before they can do any damage. In 2024 alone, we identified more than 4 billion unique browsers and mobile devices in over 250 countries and territories.
Over the past decade, the team at Fingerprint has stayed one step ahead of fraudsters, bad bots, and every creative workaround you can imagine. Our researchers were the ones who discovered and shared how to bypass audio fingerprinting protection in Safari 17 — and we continue to provide insights into the latest threats like the use of residential proxies to commit fraud.
That’s just the beginning. Our research and development teams are always working on finding new, effective ways to spot fraudsters and their tactics — and that includes the use of the ever-growing class of AI agents.
Why leading brands trust Fingerprint
Some of the world’s leading companies rely on Fingerprint to keep their platforms safe. Brands like Conde Nast, Dropbox, Vesta, and North need a solution that fits seamlessly into their fraud prevention stacks, isn’t privacy-invasive, and doesn’t annoy their users. For these enterprises, Fingerprint acts as an invisible layer of defense — and representatives from these companies joined Fingerprint’s new Customer Advisory Board as strategic partners in the fight against fraud.
Smart Signals: From a handful to a powerful set of real-time insights
When Fingerprint launched, device intelligence meant collecting some browser details to identify returning visitors to websites. Fast-forward to today, and we now analyze 100+ browser, device, and network signals to not only generate a unique, persistent identifier for every browser or device that visits a website or uses a mobile app, but to also provide more than 20 actionable, real-time Smart Signals, each designed to shine a light on a different risk factor.
Some of the most popular Smart Signals include:
- Bot Detection: Works quietly in the background to spot automated browsers and bots.
- Tampering Detection: Flags visitors using anti-detect browsers or manipulating browser and device signals to try to evade detection.
- VPN, Residential Proxy, and IP Intelligence: Reveals when visitors are trying to hide behind virtual private networks (VPNs) or residential proxies — and provides clues to their true location.
- Virtual Machine and Emulator Detection: Catches visitors running your app or site in virtual environments or mobile emulators.
- Developer Tools Detection: Identifies when developer tools are open at page load — often a sign of suspicious behavior.
All these signals work quietly in the background, so your real customers never even know they’re there.
Looking ahead: AI agent detection and the next challenge
So, what’s next for device intelligence? Fraudsters are getting better at what they do, especially with the rise of AI-driven fraud and smarter automated agents. The good news is our team is already on it. We’re investing in new ways to detect and differentiate between humans, bots, and AI agents (read this blog post to learn what we’ve released so far).
As we move into our second decade, we’re proud of how far our device intelligence has come — and incredibly grateful to our partners and customers who’ve helped us get here. Our mission stays the same: To power a safe and seamless internet through device intelligence so organizations — from small startups to enterprises — have the most accurate, reliable, and frictionless fraud prevention signals in the market. Device intelligence has gone from “nice-to-have” to “absolutely essential,” and we’re still leading the charge here at Fingerprint.
Want to join us for the next decade of device intelligence? Reach out to our sales team or sign up for a free trial.
