Looking Beyond our Series A Funding: Why Our Automated Email Phishing Detection and Response is the Next Big Thing in Cybersecurity

In case you missed it - IRONSCALES announced (link to press release) our $6.5 million Series A earlier today. This is an exciting milestone for our company and those of us that have worked so hard over the past four years to build out ground-breaking technology to combat the email phishing epidemic. We’re very thankful to our newest investor, K1 Investment Management, LLC, and our existing investor RDC for their support and belief in our cybersecurity solution.

We have always talked about why email serves a such a successful attack vector because it presents human, technological and operational challenges that cannot be mitigated by employee awareness training or technology alone. Today more than ~90 percent of all cyberattacks continue to originate with email phishing. From the U.S. Presidential campaign and Equifax to Uber, Amazon and the power grids of sovereign nations, these and many other devastating attacks all began with a malicious email that traditional signature-based defenses could not stop and phishing-educated employees could not detect.

It should come as no surprise that traditional signature-based secure email gateways and filters are easily bypassed by sophisticated spear-phishing, spoofing and business email compromise (BEC) messages. In addition, the success of employee awareness and training programs have proven limited, as the majority of workers lack the time, skills, focus and tools to serve as full-time phishing defenders. And when suspicious emails are identified and reported, security teams and incident responders are frequently ill-equipped to respond as expeditiously as phishing mitigation requires.

This reality is why we have pioneered a multi-dimensional approach to phishing mitigation that combines human intelligence with machine learning technology. Such a unification of humans and machines working together enables us to prevent, detect, respond and share intelligence, with little or no involvement from security teams. The ability for us to help reduce the burden on security teams is so important. For one, many are understaffed and backlogged with a variety of suspicious cyber activity, making it impossible to analyze suspected phishing emails as quickly as needed.

Since introducing our approach to the market, we have helped hundreds of companies within all industries to expedite the time from attack detection to enterprise-wide remediation from days or weeks to just seconds. We’ve even helped thwart some of the most devastating attacks of the past two years from negatively impacting our clients, including the Locky ransomware and Google Docs, just to name a few.

What’s Next for IRONSCALES?

IRONSCALES is on track to surpass triple-digit revenue growth for the third consecutive year. Our customers now span five continents and every industry, including government, financial services, utilities, and many more. With our Series A round investment, we plan to aggressively expand our channel partner program, bolster our sales team in North America and continue to perfect our technology with new research and development initiatives.

We’ve spent a lot of time in particular on creating an active channel program greatly benefits all participating MSSPs and resellers tremendously. You can learn more about our partner program here.We’ve also added tremendous talent to our UK sales team in recent months, and similar hires in North America will be announced in the coming weeks. This is essential as we work to meet demand and build relationships with every company on the front lines fighting the email phishing epidemic.

Rest assured, phishing is not going away. In fact, we’re now seeing it rapidly spread to other mediums, such as social media and SMS text messaging, in large part because of how easy it can be to trick unsuspecting, ill-equipped or busy people into taking a common action. But over the last four years we’ve been able to prove that the phishing risk can be significantly reduced when machines and humans work in tandem. Don’t believe me? Let us show you. Thanks for your continued support of IRONSCALES. We’re just getting started in this wild ride.