Area 1 Security, the first and only pre-emptive email security company, announced that it has raised $25 million in growth funding with the help of new investors, ForgePoint Capital and their current investors including Kleiner Perkins, Top Tier Capital and Icon Ventures.
The company also appointed its new CEO Patrick Sweeney, a cybersecurity industry leader with experience of more than 25 years in high-tech execution and general management. Before joining Area 1 Security, Sweeny served as the CEO of Talari Networks and had been driving exceptional growth performance as a senior executive at Dell and SonicWall.
The adoption of cloud-based email by companies nowadays is quite common and according to Gartner’s Email Security Market Guide, by 2021 almost 70 per cent of corporate emails will be cloud-based, dominated by Google Gmail and Microsoft Office 365. In today’s world where our inbox operates through the cloud, the vendors of Secure Email Gateway (SEG) are being challenged by various threats such as Business Email Compromises. As the organisations are drifting away from traditional Secure Email Gateways to Cloud Email Security solutions, Multi-mode inspection, Advanced phishing protection, Cloud-native scale and integrated prevention are becoming indispensable to protect them.
Sweeny said, “Email security is fundamentally broken, with phishing attacks consistently breaching defenses, leading to significant business losses for organizations large and small. The simple fact is that 95 per cent of breaches begin with a phish disguised as an innocuous email.” He believes that Area 1 will bring preemption to email security by focusing on the initial stages of an attack along with the industry’s leading small pattern analytics technology. In this way, they will be able to prevent phishing campaigns before the damage is done.
In the first half of 2020, Area 1 has prevented financial cyber fraud amounting to $273 million with the help of Business Email Compromise (BEC) phish. It has also successfully blocked millions of phish that were missed by cloud email providers and legacy SEG defenses, saving organisations from facing such serious threats.
Alberto Yepez, co-founder and managing director of ForgePoint Capital said that with the rise in the use of email as a part of business collaboration, development in email security has been static. He said, “Area 1’s preemptive approach and a performance-based business model position the company to lead this rapidly growing market and disrupt legacy incumbents who have failed their customers time and again.” Being a leading cybersecurity investor and a serial entrepreneur, Yepez is expected to join Area 1’s Board of Directors soon.
About Area 1 Security
Headquartered in California, Area 1 Security is the first and only company that works for preemptively stopping Business Email Compromise, ransomware, malware and targeted phishing attacks. Area 1 Security focuses on the earliest stages of a cyber-attack by preventing phishing- the root cause of most of the breaches. It also offers cybersecurity organisations with a unique performance-based pay model called Pay-per-Phish.
For more information, visit: https://www.area1security.com
About ForgePoint Capital
Based in the San Francisco, ForgePoint Capital is the premier cybersecurity venture fund investing transformative companies that protects the digital world. With over 40 global cybersecurity investments, the firm has been one of the most active investors in growing cybersecurity companies. The team has worked for over 8 decades towards building their company, creating value and drawing upon the largest network of trusted cybersecurity industry experts and customers to encourage entrepreneurs in building great companies.
For more information, visit: https://forgepointcap.com
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