UPDATED 13:13 EDT / MAY 25 2016

NEWS

Agari raises $22M to protect companies from phishing

More and more organizations are training their employees to identify fraudulent emails, but judging by the 270 percent increase in phishing incidents that the FBI has recorded since 2015, the effort isn’t nearly as effective as it could be. So CSOs are now turning to automated scam prevention providers like Agari Inc., which raised $22 million in funding this week to capitalize on the trend.

The capital will enable the startup to step up customer acquisition efforts and enhance the capabilities of its namesake phishing prevention system. The Agari Email Trust Platform is a cloud-based analytics engine that scans some 10 billion messages every day to identify new attack methods, malicious domains and scanners. After stumbling across a previously unknown threat, the service makes it discovery available through the startup’s two commercial offerings, which enable organizations to harness the information in their security efforts.

The first solution is called Agari Enterprise Protect and focuses on blocking phishing attacks that target internal company assets. According to startup’s website, the software employs machine learning algorithms to compare every message against the Agari Email Trust Platform’s threat database for signs of foul play. The analysis produces a risk score that is used to determine whether an email should be allowed to reach its intended recipient, or diverted to a special inbox reserved for malicious items.

From there, security professionals are able to trace fraudulent emails back to the source using Agari’s other product, Customer Protect. As the name implies, the software is designed to combat not only attacks that target a company’s workers but also attempts to scam its clients. Such campaigns can cause a tremendous amount of brand damage that has the potential to cost just as much as an employee accidentally sharing confidential information with a hacker. The startup’s ability to combat both threats at the same time has predictably garnered a lot of interest in the corporate world.

Agari claims that over 100 organizations currently use its software to combat spear-phishing, including six of the world’s top 10 banks and five of the largest social media networks. Yet CEO Pat Peterson revealed in an interview that it was still a challenge for his firm to secure capital due to today’s tough investment climate. “The trepidation and ghosts of previous investments were in the room” for its backers during the funding negotiations, he told Fortune. “I could tell it was scary time for them.”

Image via Flickr

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU