Learn more about the team behind the first major upgrade
to phishing protection in 20 years

Recognised for redefining fraud prevention and phishing protection

MetaCert received the Established Trendsetter award at Sibos 2025, hosted by SWIFT – a recognition given to companies that not only challenge convention but prove that their vision can scale.

The award celebrates organisations that saw the world differently, solved problems others accepted as unsolvable, and built solutions that are now shaping the future of finance and security. 

 

Established Trendsetter – You may have proved the doubters wrong and built something that will scale. It’s not been easy, but you’ve solved a financial inclusion dilemma or created a new and improved solution to a known problem. Everyone now sees what you saw as obvious five years ago, but they didn’t take the risk. You did.

Sibos Fintech Awards 2025. Hosted by SWIFT

About MetaCert and the Founder, Paul Walsh

MetaCert isn’t just another cybersecurity startup.

MetaCert is a Silicon Valley–based, venture-backed company built on two decades of work at the core of the internet. It specialises in stopping online impersonation by focusing on URLs, the number one tool used in phishing. MetaCert is an expert in URL classification and content labelling, with deep Irish roots as a spin-out of a telecom testing firm that was the first of its kind to join the GSMA.

Paul Walsh, MetaCert’s founder, co-founded the global standard for content labeling at the W3C – the very concept of describing and classifying user accounts and web pages. That early work laid the foundation for trust on the internet long before phishing became the dominant threat.

He was also one of the first high-profile individuals to be impersonated by hackers, an experience that shaped his understanding of how fragile trust could be online.

MetaCert also holds patents that remain licensed today by the world’s top security vendors. Even as the company has moved beyond traditional detection, those patents still underpin anti-phishing and anti-malware technology inside the mobile apps people use every day. The fact that competitors continue to license MetaCert’s IP speaks to the depth of its innovation and credibility in the industry.

Where others stopped at detection, MetaCert went further. The company pioneered the concept of Zero Trust for web links – the idea that every link should be treated as untrusted until explicitly verified as legitimate. This shift from reactive to preventative is the first real upgrade in internet security in more than twenty years.

Paul’s career has been defined by anticipating where trust breaks down online, and building the frameworks to restore it. MetaCert and Link Verifier represents the culmination of that work: extending Zero Trust to the last unprotected frontier of the internet, the link itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

MetaCert is a venture backed cybersecurity company that protects people from fraud and phishing-led cyberattacks. MetaCert invented Zero Trust URL Authentication, the first major upgrade to phishing protection in 20 years. Most leading security companies license MetaCert’s patents for mobile app security.

MetaCert was founded in 2011 with a mission to rethink internet security for the protection of kids. It began as a company focused on URL classification and content labelling, and over time evolved into the inventor of Zero Trust URL Authentication – a preventative model now protecting people from phishing at internet scale.

Every security company focused on phishing protection could be seen as a competitor, but also a potential partner. The security industry continues to rely on the outdated threat detection model, which is clearly not effective or reliable. Our API makes it easy for security vendors to off their customers a Zero Trust strategy for phishing protection.

We partner with organisations that want to offer Zero Trust phishing protection across their mobile apps, services, or networks. Our technology is easy to integrate through a lightweight API, and we support flexible models for distribution, co-branding, and direct deployment.

Whether you’re a security vendor, telecom operator, bank, payment provider, or tech company, we can help you adopt Zero Trust protection for web links and deliver visible security to your customers and employees.

To explore a partnership, email us at hello@metacert.com.

Other security companies rely on detecting known threats using databases, AI, and machine learning. These systems assume a link is safe until proven dangerous, which creates a gap that criminals exploit. MetaCert flips this model by applying Zero Trust to web links. Every link is treated as untrusted until it’s explicitly verified as legitimate. This prevents phishing before harm can happen, using real-time authentication rather than delayed detection. It’s a fundamental shift in how trust is established online.

The gold standard in cybersecurity is Zero Trust and MetaCert just happens to be the first to apply that principle to web links so the world can finally stop being attacked by online impersonations.

The security industry was built around threat detection because that’s what it knows. For over 20 years, business models, infrastructure, and incentives have been shaped around scanning for danger instead of checking for legitimacy. But phishing doesn’t need to look dangerous to succeed. It just needs to look familiar. MetaCert saw the flaw in that model and rebuilt from first principles, treating every link as untrusted until verified and inventing the infrastructure to do it at scale.

The industry will follow. Our goal is to help accelerate that shift by providing an API service that makes it easy for any security vendor to adopt Zero Trust for web links inside their own products and services in the same way they already ingest threat feeds from companies like MetaCert.

MetaCert is backed by Moneta Ventures, a Sacramento-based VC firm, along with three angel networks based in Silicon Valley and Nevada. Our investors also include notable entrepreneurs and angel investors who founded companies like Travelocity, Kayak, Qik (acquired by Microsoft), PayByPhone (acquired by Volkswagen), and Appthority (acquired by Symantec).

MetaCert has always operated as a remote-first company with team members mostly across Ireland, the UK, Australia, Canada, Ukraine, the US. While the company was founded in San Francisco, it no longer maintains a physical headquarters. This distributed structure allows MetaCert to work closely with global partners in telecoms, banking, and cybersecurity.

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