Fraud prevention firm SEON has hired Otto Toth, former CTO of digital news outlet The Huffington Post and SVP and chief mobile innovation officer at AOL. The news comes shortly after the company secured €10 million ($12 million) Series A investment and opened new regional offices in Austin, USA, and Jakarta, Indonesia.
Over his 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. He will also be in charge of compliance, security and coordinating with external partners to improve SEON’s infrastructure.
“I wanted to utilize 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,” Toth said. “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.”
“SEON has been a huge success and is attracting the very best talent internationally,” its co-founder and CEO Tamas Kadar said. “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. Its Series A funding round was reportedly the largest 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.