Israeli phishing protection startup Ironscales Ltd. today said it has raised $15 million in new funding to assist it in scaling up its North American operations and boost research and development.

The Series B round was led by K1 Investment Management with additional investors not named. The company last raised venture capital in December 2017.

Founded in 2014, Ironscales offers a platform that uses human intelligence and machine learning to give users and security professionals the tools they need not only to detect but to prevent phishing attacks.

The company does so by learning how both users and attackers behave over time to provide real-time visibility and real-time control to detect and stop phishing attacks of all types. “Ironscales helps organizations where its email security hurts most, with post-message delivery detection and response,” a spokesperson for Ironscales told SiliconANGLE. The company’s “hybrid human intelligence and machine learning solution gives end users and security professionals the right training, tools, and intelligence – all with one-click resolution from a single platform – to hunt, log, alert, analyze and remediate phishing attacks.”

Ironsides is finding a willing audience, nearing nearly 1,000 enterprise customers and triple-digit revenue growth over the past 12 months. Customers include firms in financial services, healthcare, retail, education and other industries.

“While email phishing is the oldest and most recognizable cyberattack technique, it remains an extremely complex problem that today requires the power of both artificial and human intelligence in an ongoing cycle of innovation for it to have any positive effect on an organization’s security posture,” Eyal Benishti, Ironscales’ founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

The company is regarded as an Israeli Defense Force alumni, since Benishti worked for the IDF’s Intelligence Technology unit, described by Forbes in 2016 as “Israel’s secret startup machine.” The number of funded tech startups that can trace their way back to the IDF and in particular unit 8200, the specialist tech corps, competes with Stanford University grads by number. In fact, Tel Aviv surpasses Silicon Valley by one metric, with a report in February claiming that the city has the highest per capita number of startups in the world.

Including the new funding, Ironscales has raised $25 million to date. Previous investors include RDSeed and Rafael Development Corp.

Image: K1 Investment Management