By Patrick Peterson
Today, I am excited to share with you that Agari has closed a $15M Series C round of funding led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from existing investors including Alloy Ventures, Battery Ventures, and First Round Capital. This investment triples the amount of capital Agari has raised and will enable the growth of Agari's disruptive security solutions and the transformation of the entire security landscape.
I’ve spent almost 15 years (wow) at IronPort, Cisco and now Agari fighting cybercriminals. I’ve watched in frustration as $6 billion in market value has been returned to email security investors while at the same time witnessing the growing success of cybercriminals. This funding round validates our years of commitment to building new and disruptive solutions that fundamentally change the equation and provides the resources needed to truly turn the tables on cybercriminals in favor of the good guys.
How We Got Here
Our mission at Agari is clear - we're creating a world safe from cyberattacks by starting with the weakest link - email. Email is many things:
In fact, email provides the most common entry vector for consumer and enterprise cyberattacks. Email played a role in almost every recent data breach, including the massive Target breach which affected 110 million consumers, either as a point of entry or to be used for brand hijacking following a breach. Furthermore, email dubiously is used to establish a foothold in 95% of state-sponsored attacks.
We're putting an end to email's role as the entry gate to your kingdom, be it as a consumer or enterprise. Agari’s success relies on an entirely different model from other security solutions - we're knitting together data from the world's largest email senders, email receivers and technology partners - and using this data to enable an unprecedented level of visibility and control into email.
Because we have made securing email our mission, we decided to build our business upon an open email standard we helped author called DMARC. Everyone asks me, "why did you decide to build a business on an open standard?" The answer for me is simple - because the more open, the more scalable. And scaling is important if we are going to change email forever, and finally make it secure for users, consumers and enterprises, in every corner of the globe.
Merely the Beginning
The brands that have been the most forward-thinking about security, the early adopters of DMARC including JPMorgan Chase, CapitalOne, Aetna, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Netflix, DocuSign, UPS (and the list goes on and on), have paved the path for every other consumer brand to get on board. And if you are a consumer brand, you simply cannot afford to not have your security house in order a moment longer.
What we've built to date is just the tip of the iceberg - daily headlines of security breaches, theft of personal information and successful nation state attacks serve as sobering reminders of just how severe and pervasive the issues are, and how much work still lies ahead to win this war on cybercrime, where we believe email is the weakest link.
How We Will Invest The Money
Why We Picked Scale Venture Partners
Put simply, ScaleVP knows scale. It’s time to go big, and their depth of knowledge of growing SaaS businesses is unparalleled. They understood our ecosystem model and opportunity quickly. And bringing Ariel Tseitlin onto our board is a huge coup. Ariel wrote the book at Netflix on scaling cloud services and created a number of revolutionary techniques to enhance cloud reliability. Furthermore Ariel gets our buyer - the IT security executive - and will be digging in to ensure we are scaling our cloud and building new products and tranches of value for our market.
Who We Want To Thank
Our customers who believed in us and gave us a chance to solve some of their most difficult and pernicious security and brand challenges. Our investors who believed in our disruptive vision. The email receivers - Aol, Comcast, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and many others who supported the DMARC standard and power the data that helps protect consumers every day.
Today, I am excited to share with you that Agari has closed a $15M Series C round of funding led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from existing investors including Alloy Ventures, Battery Ventures, and First Round Capital. This investment triples the amount of capital Agari has raised and will enable the growth of Agari's disruptive security solutions and the transformation of the entire security landscape.
I’ve spent almost 15 years (wow) at IronPort, Cisco and now Agari fighting cybercriminals. I’ve watched in frustration as $6 billion in market value has been returned to email security investors while at the same time witnessing the growing success of cybercriminals. This funding round validates our years of commitment to building new and disruptive solutions that fundamentally change the equation and provides the resources needed to truly turn the tables on cybercriminals in favor of the good guys.
How We Got Here
Our mission at Agari is clear - we're creating a world safe from cyberattacks by starting with the weakest link - email. Email is many things:
- This year, it's 32 years old
- It's ubiquitous
- It's open
- It offers the biggest big dataset
- And, it's fundamentally not secure
In fact, email provides the most common entry vector for consumer and enterprise cyberattacks. Email played a role in almost every recent data breach, including the massive Target breach which affected 110 million consumers, either as a point of entry or to be used for brand hijacking following a breach. Furthermore, email dubiously is used to establish a foothold in 95% of state-sponsored attacks.
We're putting an end to email's role as the entry gate to your kingdom, be it as a consumer or enterprise. Agari’s success relies on an entirely different model from other security solutions - we're knitting together data from the world's largest email senders, email receivers and technology partners - and using this data to enable an unprecedented level of visibility and control into email.
Because we have made securing email our mission, we decided to build our business upon an open email standard we helped author called DMARC. Everyone asks me, "why did you decide to build a business on an open standard?" The answer for me is simple - because the more open, the more scalable. And scaling is important if we are going to change email forever, and finally make it secure for users, consumers and enterprises, in every corner of the globe.
Merely the Beginning
The brands that have been the most forward-thinking about security, the early adopters of DMARC including JPMorgan Chase, CapitalOne, Aetna, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Netflix, DocuSign, UPS (and the list goes on and on), have paved the path for every other consumer brand to get on board. And if you are a consumer brand, you simply cannot afford to not have your security house in order a moment longer.
What we've built to date is just the tip of the iceberg - daily headlines of security breaches, theft of personal information and successful nation state attacks serve as sobering reminders of just how severe and pervasive the issues are, and how much work still lies ahead to win this war on cybercrime, where we believe email is the weakest link.
How We Will Invest The Money
- Power the Platform: Our platform is amazing - it harnesses intelligence from 6 billion messages every day and as a result Agari was inducted into the prestigious JPMorgan Chase Hall of Innovation. In reality, we’ve only scratched the surface. We will add global data sources, provide richer fidelity on the malware we see, build solutions with an expanded level of visibility and enable our clients to seamlessly integrate Agari within their IT ecosystem.
- Power our Ecosystem: The Agari solution is unique because it affects visibility and control at Internet scale. This is only possible through an ecosystem that includes email receivers, third party marketers, messaging infrastructure providers, companies that take down malicious phishing sites and others. Agari will be expanding and enhancing this ecosystem globally.
- Go Global: Agari is proud to have some of the world’s largest global companies as clients throughout Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. This capital will fuel our expansion in all of these markets to move beyond early adopters to offer our market leading solutions to all consumer brands who have an interest in preserving brand equity and protecting their consumers' data.
Why We Picked Scale Venture Partners
Put simply, ScaleVP knows scale. It’s time to go big, and their depth of knowledge of growing SaaS businesses is unparalleled. They understood our ecosystem model and opportunity quickly. And bringing Ariel Tseitlin onto our board is a huge coup. Ariel wrote the book at Netflix on scaling cloud services and created a number of revolutionary techniques to enhance cloud reliability. Furthermore Ariel gets our buyer - the IT security executive - and will be digging in to ensure we are scaling our cloud and building new products and tranches of value for our market.
Who We Want To Thank
Our customers who believed in us and gave us a chance to solve some of their most difficult and pernicious security and brand challenges. Our investors who believed in our disruptive vision. The email receivers - Aol, Comcast, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and many others who supported the DMARC standard and power the data that helps protect consumers every day.