Valimail, a pioneer in automated email authentication, has raised a $25 million round of funding to help accelerate its global growth and expand its portfolio of trust-based anti-impersonation services.
Valimail helps leading organisations including Yelp, Uber, Fannie Mae, Manulife and WeWork stop fraud, brand abuse and data theft through its automated email trust platform.
The Series B investment is led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from existing venture investors Shasta Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners and Bloomberg Beta.
“Valimail was founded to bring trust to the world’s communications, starting with email,” said Valimail co-founder and CEO Alexander García-Tobar.
“In a world of first-generation solutions with failure rates over 70 per cent, we believed total automation was a necessary approach.
“The past three years have proven our thesis that the market both needs and values automated authentication. Now we’re prepared to make our platform available worldwide.”
The company has found that impersonation-based email attacks are the number one vector for cyber-attacks of all kinds.
Valimail’s Identity-Driven Email Anti-impersonation (IDEA)™ platform stops these attacks by automating implementation and ongoing management of email authentication.
The platform ensures that unauthorised senders using an organisation’s domains in email messages are automatically blocked globally.
“Valimail’s technology represents the perfect convergence of a huge need (stopping impersonation and restoring trust to email), a rapidly growing market, and a revolutionary technology led by an experienced, disciplined team,” said Brian Melton, managing director at Tenaya Capital.
“Valimail’s automation platform is a best-in-class solution that’s already found a substantial market and widespread recognition for its technical superiority. It will have wide application in the years to come.”
Both the private and public sectors now recognise email authentication as critical in preventing so called email ‘spoofing’ or impersonation attacks.
Gartner Inc. recommends that security and risk management leaders involved in fraud prevention should work with brand stakeholders to “implement domain-level email authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM and DMARC) as the strongest technical protection against exact-domain spoofing of domains owned or controlled by their enterprise.”
Most companies deploying DMARC don’t make it to enforcement, however. Valimail’s enforcement guarantee ensures that customers get the benefits of authentication quickly and effortlessly so they can stop impersonation attacks right away.
“After attempting email authentication with other solutions, I was amazed at the level of automation Valimail provides,” said JJ Agha, VP of information security at WeWork.
“It eliminates the need for two FTEs, so my staff can focus on other key priorities. I consider it a ‘set it and forget it’ solution for ensuring that our employees and executives can’t be impersonated and that our email is trusted.”
As it expands, Valimail will be hiring multiple positions across a number of different departments, including engineering, sales, customer success and marketing.