Area 1 Security Raises $25M to Drive Fast-Growing Cloud Email Security Market

Area 1 Security made some important news last year with a pay-for-performance anti-phishing service and being named Google cloud global technology partner of the year for security. This past January or as we like to call it, the pre-covid days, they uncovered the Russian cyber breach of Ukrainian oil company, Burisma Holdings.

Profile photo of Patrick Sweeney
Patrick Sweeney, CEO of Talari Networks

Today, the preemptive email security company, announced it has closed $25 million in growth funding led by new investors, ForgePoint Capital, along with current investors Kleiner Perkins, Icon Ventures and Top Tier Capital. The company also announced the appointment of cybersecurity industry leader, Patrick Sweeney, as CEO.  Sweeney comes to Area 1 Security with more than 25 years of high-tech executive and general management experience. He most recently served as CEO of SD-WAN Expo Sponsor Talari Networks (sold to Oracle in 2019) and held senior executive roles at Dell and SonicWall, where he consistently drove exceptional growth and financial performance.

Area 1 Security has a strong focus on preventing business email compromise via advanced phishing protection, multi-mode inspection, cloud-native scale and integrated prevention, detection and response.  

“Email security is fundamentally broken, with phishing attacks consistently breaching defenses, leading to significant business losses for organizations large and small. The simple fact is that 95 percent of breaches begin with a phish disguised as an innocuous email,” said Sweeney. “By focusing on the earliest stages of an attack combined with the industry’s leading small pattern analytics technology, Area 1 is uniquely able to bring preemption to email security. We stop phishing campaigns prior to their inflicting damage.”

In the first half of 2020 alone, Area 1 intercepted and prevented $273 million in active financial cyber fraud perpetrated through sophisticated Business Email Compromise (BEC) phish. The company also blocked millions of phish missed by cloud email providers and legacy SEG defenses, underscoring the enormity of the problem organizations face. 

Profile photo of Alberto Yépez
Alberto Yepez, co-founder and managing director of ForgePoint Capital

“While email continues to be the predominant business collaboration application, innovation in Email Security has stagnated. We’ve seen damage from email security failures climb to outrageous heights over the past few years, with little indication of slowing down,” said Alberto Yepez, co-founder and managing director of ForgePoint Capital. “Area 1’s preemptive approach and a performance-based business model position the company to lead this rapidly growing market and disrupt legacy incumbents who have failed their customers time and again.” 

Yepez, a leading cybersecurity investor and serial entrepreneur, will also join Area 1’s Board of Directors.

Area 1’s expanded leadership and financing (which now totals $82.5 million) demonstrates fast-growing demand for its Cloud Email Security solution led by Fortune 500 customers across financial services, healthcare, consumer goods, manufacturing, and other industries. The new financing will continue the company’s heavy product R&D investment, and significantly expand its go-to-market resources with a specific focus on an aggressive multi-tier channel strategy.

Sadly, it is fairly easy to get employees to click on phishing emails and they are becoming more targeted because hackers are getting more sophisticated and a wealth of data is available on the victims they seek. We are happy to see Area 1 Security growing and getting funding to invest in fighting hackers and hopefully preventing more business email compromise.

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