LONDON, June 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --
- Series A round led by Balderton Capital and
Accel
- Annual revenues up by 400 per cent
year-on-year
- Clients include Schroders, Man Group & 70+ leading UK
law firms
Tessian, the UK-based machine intelligence start-up transforming
the way enterprises secure email, today announces that it has
raised $13 million (£9 million) in a
Series A round led by Balderton Capital and existing investors,
Accel. Amadeus Capital Partners, Crane, LocalGlobe, Winton Ventures
and Walking Ventures also participated in the round.
Against a backdrop where enterprises are creating a growing
share of the world's data - in 2015 businesses created 30 percent
of all data globally, but this is expected to soar to almost 60 per
cent by 2025 - Tessian's mission is to automatically protect
individuals and enterprises from cybersecurity threats in order to
keep the world's most sensitive data and systems private and
secure.
Contrary to the popular belief that organisations are most
likely to lose their data through being hacked, misaddressed emails
are currently the number one data security incident reported to the
Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). Furthermore, under GDPR,
it's now mandatory for organisations to report such breaches
involving personal information to the ICO, with the resulting fines
as high as 4 percent of global turnover for the worst data
breaches.
Tessian's founders, Tom Adams,
Ed Bishop and Tim Sadler, met as engineering students at
Imperial College before they started their careers in investment
banking for some of the world's largest financial institutions. It
was while working in finance that they saw a gap in the market to
protect companies against the problem of highly sensitive
information being sent to the wrong person on email, which can have
severe business consequences and cause lasting reputational
damage.
"With the recent report from the ICO that misaddressed emails
are now the number one data security incident reported to them and
GDPR now in full swing, companies should make addressing this risk
a top security priority," says Tim
Sadler, CEO and co-founder of Tessian (formerly
Checkrecipient). "It's human nature to fear scary things like
hackers or malware, but we often don't think twice about the
dangers behind something as familiar and ingrained as sending an
email. In reality that's where an overwhelming threat lies."
Machine intelligence.
Since their seed round last year, the Tessian team has grown
from 13 to 50 people, while annual recurring revenue is up by over
400 per cent in the last 12 months. The company will use the Series
A investment to rapidly expand its product offering and grow its
business by increasing the size of its sales and marketing
teams.
After installation, Tessian's machine intelligence technology
analyses enterprise email networks to understand normal and
abnormal email sending patterns and behaviours. Tessian then
detects anomalies in outgoing emails and warns users about
potential mistakes, before the email is sent.
Unlike legacy rule-based technologies, Tessian requires no admin
from security teams and no end-user behaviour change. The Tessian
platform can be deployed in under an hour and provides immediate
historical reports that show how many misaddressed emails an
organisation has sent prior to the installation date.
"What Tessian have done - and this is why we are so excited
about them - is apply machine intelligence to understand how humans
communicate with each other and use that deeper understanding to
secure enterprise email networks," says Balderton Capital Partner
Suranga Chandratillake. "The genius of this approach is that while
the product focus today is on email - by far the most used
communication channel in the corporate enterprise - their
technology can be applied to all communication channels in time.
And, as we all communicate in larger volumes and on more channels,
that represents a vast opportunity."
As part of the investment, Balderton Partner Suranga
Chandratillake and Accel Partner Luciana
Lixandru join the board. She says, "The effectiveness of
Tessian's product attracted our attention at an early stage. Since
our seed investment just over a year ago, the company's ability to
address a fundamental data security risk has been reflected in its
strong growth and a string of blue chip client wins. I'm excited to
be working even more closely with the team, as it rolls out its
solution to an even greater number of businesses."
Tessian makes email safe at world leading organisations like
Schroders, Man Group and Dentons and over 70 of the UK's leading
law firms are now using platform to protect their email
networks.
"With GDPR at the forefront of every organisation's minds, Clyde
& Co is focused on building a resilient approach to keep our
client data confidential and secure.
"The speed and ease of deployment of Tessian has been
unparalleled by any other solution we've dealt with, and has been
our quickest GDPR win to date.
"Misaddressed emails are a major cybersecurity problem that all
organisations have to deal with, but trying to train human error
out of employees is near impossible. Tessian's machine intelligence
plays a vital role in helping mitigate these kinds of errors and
ensure that customer data remains secure and private." -
Chris White, Global Chief
Information Officer, Clyde & Co
About Tessian
Tessian is a machine intelligent email security platform to
automatically prevent security threats like misaddressed emails,
data loss and non-compliance. Tessian uses machine learning to
understand normal email communication patterns in order to
automatically identify email security threats in real time, without
the need for end user behaviour change or pre-defined rules and
policies. The Tessian platform makes email safe at some of the
world's largest enterprises across the financial, legal and
technology sectors. For more, visit http://www.tessian.com.
About Balderton Capital
Balderton Capital is Europe's
largest early stage venture capital investor, focused on European
technology companies at Series A. Based in London, the firm manages $2.6bn and invests in entrepreneurs building
globally ambitious businesses. Balderton's Partners and advisory
team include the founders and operational leaders of multi-billion
dollar companies including Business Objects, Dropbox, Uber and
Autonomy. Previous investments include Betfair (FTSE: BET), Magic
Pony (Twitter), NaturalMotion (Zynga), Sunrise (Microsoft) and Yoox
Net-a-Porter (BIT: YNAP). Among Balderton's current portfolio of 76
companies are: Aircall, Carwow, Citymapper, Contentful,
GoCardless, The Hut Group, Kobalt Music, Nutmeg, Prodigy Finance,
Recorded Future, Revolut, ROLI, SOPHiA Genetics, Talend (NASDAQ:
TLND), Vestiaire Collective, and Vivino.
About Accel
Accel is a leading venture capital firm that invests in people
and their companies from the earliest days through all phases of
private company growth. Atlassian, Algolia, Avito, CallSign,
Celonis, Cloudera, Crowdstrike, Deliveroo, DJI, Dropbox, Etsy,
Facebook, Flipkart, Funding Circle, Kayak, Kry, QlikTech, Rovio,
Slack, Spotify, Supercell, UiPath and WorldRemit are among the
companies the firm has backed over the past 30 years. The firm
seeks to understand entrepreneurs as individuals, appreciate their
originality and play to their strengths. Because greatness doesn't
have a stereotype. For more, visit http://www.accel.com,
http://www.facebook.com/accel or http://www.twitter.com/accel.
About Amadeus Capital Partners
Amadeus Capital Partners is a global technology investor. Since
1997, the firm has raised over $1bn
for investment and used it to back more than 130 companies. With
vast experience and a great network, Amadeus' team of investors and
entrepreneurs share a passion for the transformative power of
technology.
We invest in consumer services, financial technology, artificial
intelligence, cyber security, medical technology, digital
healthcare and digital media.
Early stage investments we've made include genomic research data
collaboration platform Repositive, massively parallel simulation
platform Improbable; Graphcore, innovators in intelligent
microprocessors, and speech recognition company VocalIQ (acquired
by Apple). To learn more visit https://amadeuscapital.com and
follow us on Twitter @AmadeusCapital.
Tessian Press Kit
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1uf70wyafeduo5y/AABjUZRKM_E2OdSox68hUq-Ka?dl=0