London-based cybersecurity company Tessian is one of the fastest growing platforms in its category. It is helping hundreds of enterprises all over the world to reduce the possibilities of human security breaches.
In a recent development, Tessian has raised $42 million (€37 million) in a Series B funding round. The investment was led by Sequoia along with Latitude and its existing investors such as Accel and Balderton Capital. In addition to the funding, Mall Miller, a partner at Sequoia will join the board of Tessian. This fund will be used to accelerate the company’s expansion in the global markets including the US.
Employs machine learning
Tessian uses machine learning in order to eliminate security vulnerabilities such as speak phishing and misdirected emails that surround enterprise email. The cybersecurity platform will analyse the historical email data to understand the context of human communication and relationships. By understanding the normal email activity, it can detect the presence of anomalies posing a security threat automatically.
Suspicious emails that appear to be security threats will be flagged with warning notifications. This will alert employees and security admins in real-time as soon as threats are detected. Also, the latter will get to know the action that was taken by the employees when the warning was issued.
Expansion plans
Tessian was founded in 2013 by Imperial College engineers Edward Bishop, Tom Adams and Tim Sadler. In 2018, the UK-based company grew by over 300%. It has been adopted and celebrated by numerous leading enterprises in the UK. Also, it was awarded “Best AI/ML Provider” from Computing Technology Product Awards last year. It aims to expand its presence globally and will invest heavily in the R&D this year so that its portfolio is also expanded.
Tessian client base
Tessian has a global client base operating across sectors such as technology, financial, legal and healthcare. The clients of this cybersecurity firm include international law firms Clifford, Dentons and Chance and financial institutions such as Investec and Schroders and FTSE 100 company Rightmove.
“We’ve entered the third era of enterprise cybersecurity. In the early days, network security sufficed. Then cloud apps and mobile devices proliferated, and we adopted endpoint protection. But in spite of these protections, data breaches are at an all-time high. The reason is humans. People are the most important decision makers in the enterprise and process extremely sensitive information on a daily basis, yet they’re more vulnerable than ever before. Tessian’s mission is to help organisations protect people processing data using technology that empowers, rather than restricts the way they work” explained Tim Sadler, CEO and co-founder of Tessian.
Matt Miller, Partner at Sequoia, said: “For years the security market has focused mostly on protecting critical machine driven points of vulnerability such as the network, the endpoint, the cloud or SaaS connection. To us, this has always seemed somewhat flawed because the biggest asset and vulnerability to any enterprise is its people. We are enthusiastic to partner with Tessian because we believe in this team and its ability to leverage machine learning to help enterprises protect their people. Tessian’s human-centric approach is incredibly distinctive and is already resonating well with customers. We are excited to help them create this market focused on Human Layer Security.
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