Armorblox Raises Series B Funding to Restore Trust in Email Communications

Armorblox, a cybersecurity innovator that helps organizations communicate more securely over email, today announced that it raised $30 million in Series B venture capital funding. Led by Next47, with participation from Polaris Partners and Unusual Ventures, as well as General Catalyst and other early investors, the funding round brings Armorblox’s total funding to $46.5 million.

Armorblox is on a mission to restore and uphold trust in email communications by stopping targeted, socially engineered attacks from compromising people and data. The funding comes amidst fast-paced customer growth during 2020, accelerated further by the widespread shift to remote work and a growing discontent with the complexity and ineffectiveness of traditional email security controls. Already protecting over 9,000 organizations, Armorblox is using the new funding to expand its go-to-market, engineering, and data science teams and further cement its position as a next-generation email security provider that is centered around delivering customer value.

The pace of enterprises shifting to cloud-delivered email increased considerably in 2020, with Gartner’s 2020 Market Guide for Email Security noting that 71% of companies now use cloud or hybrid cloud email¹. Enterprise customers are moving away from legacy secure email gateways and now look for augments to built-in email security that are easy to use and take a materially different approach to threat protection. Armorblox deploys rapidly by connecting with Office 365, G Suite, and Exchange over APIs without disturbing the mail flow or requiring MX record changes. The Armorblox Natural Language Understanding (NLU) platform analyzes thousands of signals to understand the context of communications; this context enables it to stop Business Email Compromise (BEC) and targeted phishing attacks, protect sensitive PII and PCI, and automate remediation of user-reported email threats.

“We could not be more excited to join Armorblox on their journey to secure the human layer,” said T.J. Rylander, General Partner at Next47. “Feedback from Armorblox customers has been unanimously positive - whether it’s the quick time to value they have seen from the product, the velocity of new capabilities that move the needle for email protection, or how easy they’ve found collaborating with the Armorblox team.”

“The biggest benefits of Armorblox to the City of San Jose are the confidence we get that it's working and preventing a lot of risk from hitting our organization, and the ease of management,” said Rob Lloyd, Chief Information Officer at the City of San Jose. “The fact that we can cover 7,000+ employees, 10,000+ accounts, use AI in a very fruitful and productive way to manage risk, and do so without over inundating our security operations center and cybersecurity staff, are powerful validators of the value Armorblox provides.”

“Security in healthcare requires rethinking the fundamentals at a foundational level. Email is as basic as it gets, and at TeamHealth, we were very impressed by the ability of Armorblox to protect us against targeted attacks, and automate triage and remediation of threats,” said Tom Perrine, CIO and CISO, TeamHealth.

"Our decision to invest in Armorblox was driven by the magnitude of the customer problem it serves as well as the universal applicability of its unique technology," said Dave Barrett, Managing Partner at Polaris Partners. "The company has experienced exceptional traction across large enterprises, mid-tier and small/medium business segments. Targeted email attacks affect organizations regardless of size, and we're delighted to partner with a company like Armorblox that combines true enterprise-grade security with consumer-grade simplicity of operations."

According to the 2020 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 22% of breaches involved social engineering, and 96% of those breaches came through email. In 2019, the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received over 23,000 complaints about BEC and Email Account Compromise (EAC) with adjusted losses of over $1.7 billion.

“Incumbent email security technology was not designed to protect against the targeted, socially engineered attacks plaguing organizations today,” said DJ Sampath, co-founder and CEO of Armorblox. “Relying solely on threat feeds, metadata, and other one-shot detection techniques will never be enough to stop emails specifically crafted to attack organizations and compromise their business workflows. This funding enables us to continue refining and scaling our approach to context-aware threat detection to protect the most attacked and most vulnerable security layer - the human layer.”

To learn more about Armorblox and its latest funding round, read a blog from the Armorblox CEO here.

Resources

• Industry recognition: Armorblox was named a 2020 Gartner Cool Vendor in Cloud Office Security.
• Customer story: How the City of San Jose used Armorblox to stop targeted email attacks from disrupting operations.
• Customer story: How a global communications provider enlisted Armorblox to streamline and accelerate phishing response.

About Armorblox

Armorblox secures enterprise communications over email and other cloud office applications with the power of Natural Language Understanding (NLU). The Armorblox platform connects over APIs and analyzes thousands of signals to understand the context of communications and protect people and data from compromise. Over 9,000 organizations use Armorblox to stop BEC and targeted phishing attacks, protect sensitive PII and PCI, and automate remediation of user-reported email threats. Armorblox was featured in the 2019 Forbes AI 50 list and was named a 2020 Gartner Cool Vendor in Cloud Office Security. Founded in 2017, Armorblox is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA and backed by General Catalyst and Next47. To learn more, visit https://www.armorblox.com/.

Note 1 - Gartner, “Market Guide for Email Security,” Mark Harris et al, Sept. 08, 2020.

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