As a result of our recent $15 million Series B, I am proud to announce that we are advancing on our journey toward bringing fully automated anti-phishing threat protection to inboxes across the globe. In case you missed the announcement, we have once again teamed up with K1 Investment Management and couldn’t be more grateful for their continued support for our vision for the future of email security.

With nearly 1,000 customers, 30+ employees and 54 partners across the globe, there are so many people who have helped us reach this milestone, and I am thankful for them every single day.

Since we launched IRONSCALES in 2014, we have remained steadfast in our commitment to educating the market on the complexities of email security, and why truly mitigating phishing risk requires humans and machines to work together.

Amazingly back then, we were laser-focused on solving the problems of the time - primarily spear-phishing, whaling, doxing etc. Fast forward to today:

• Email is still the number one vector for cyberattacks, but new and advanced techniques like ransomware and business email compromise (BEC) have made detection, protection and response that much more difficult.
• Polymorphic phishing attacks are on the rise: More than 4 in 10 phishing emails underwent as few as two and as many as 521 permutations per attack in a span of 12 months, according to our research.
• Automated phishing-as-a-service is massively increasingly the volume of attacks. If companies don’t equip themselves with AI-powered technologies, they are bringing a knife to a gunfight in the battle against cybercriminals.

The dangers of email phishing and the vulnerabilities inherent to email are much more widely known today than they were five years ago. We like to think that we had something to do with that.

Despite increased awareness, email security remains an enormous issue for businesses, government agencies, and organizations alike. Just take a look at the city of Baltimore, which suffered for a month in the grips of a ransomware attack with experts estimating the cost to the city exceeding $18 million.

Slowly but surely, businesses are beginning to understand that signature-based secure email gateways, filters, point solutions, DMARC, and pseudo-automated security tools are not holding their own against advanced attacks.

Even when such solutions can identify threats, security teams are frequently understaffed and ill-equipped to handle the necessary immediate response. Time is of the essence with phishing mitigation, as it only takes 82 seconds for an attack to get its first click.

Our innovation is commanding

I couldn’t be prouder of our entire team. They have worked to push the limits of what customers can expect from their email security provider. Since our Series A funding, our engineers have:

• Strengthened our platforms’ advanced malware and URL/link protection to safeguard inboxes from malicious inbound emails.
• Launched an AI-driven virtual email security analyst to help determine a verdict on suspicious email incidents in real-time.
• Delivered the email security industry’s first mobile app that enables analysts to make important decisions on suspicious messages from any mobile device.

Our innovation hasn’t gone unnoticed. Since 2018, we have won 12 awards, including the AI-Powered Email Security Innovation Award by Frost & Sullivan and the Best Enterprise Email Security Solution by the Cybersecurity Breakthrough Awards. We’ve also been featured in countless publications, and recognized as thought leaders across the world.

It’s been a great ride, but we’re not done yet.

Our future is powerful, autonomous & decentralized

Looking ahead, we have a lot left to accomplish as we lead the charge towards the autonomous virtual analyst. Ultimately, we envision email security to one day be fully autonomous, AI powered, capable of handling phishing incidents at a clip that humans cannot. But before we can reach full autonomy, we must continue to decentralize threat intelligence sharing.

I recently wrote in SC Magazine about the lessons the cybersecurity industry must learn from Uber’s approach to decentralization. While most in our industry agree that greater intelligence sharing is needed, the adoption of a decentralization mindset has yet to reach its potential. But only by taking this step can the cybersecurity industry truly modernize, leveraging the quality and quantity of cyber intelligence of hundreds of security analysts and millions of employees.

With our new funding, IRONSCALES is blazing ahead with decentralized communities by encouraging the collective sharing of information through our platform, ultimately proactively preparing against attacks through automatic detection and response.

Current users have access to nearly one thousand cyber analysts, and this number grows every time that a new company comes onto the platform. Ultimately, this collective cyber-defense approach strengthens how quickly our platform can respond to threats through people and technology. We call it the power of the pack.

IRONSCALES will also further our commitment to innovation with AI. We’ve already introduced our users to email security’s first AI-powered assistant, but that’s just the beginning. Our product roadmap continues to think outside the box so that we can ensure that our platform remains best suited to help businesses where their email security hurts the most – with comprehensive post-delivery protection, detection, and remediation.

We’ve come a long way since 2014, and we’re excited for what’s to come and the value we can bring our users.

Thank you for your continued support of IRONSCALES. We’ve been able to do a lot in our short time, but we’re looking forward to doing a whole lot more for you in the coming months and years.

Together, we can bring the power of collective cybersecurity to deliver the industry’s most advanced email security broker in the fight against phishing, BEC, and other types of email fraud.