Cloud Email Security Company Abnormal Security Secures $50 Million

By Amit Chowdhry ● Nov 21, 2020
  • Abnormal Security — a next-generation email security company — announced that it raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Menlo Ventures

Abnormal Security — a next-generation email security company — announced that it raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Menlo Ventures with participation from early investor Greylock. Including this round of funding, Abnormal has raised a total of $75 million. And according to Forbes’ sources, this funding round was at a valuation of more than $500 million.

This funding round comes at a time as the company saw record growth in 2020, fueled by the growing importance of email security as enterprises shift to remote work. And since the start of the year, Abnormal tripled its Fortune 500-level customer base and drove a 3x year-over-year increase in annual recurring revenue. Plus the company is using the new funding to double the size of its machine learning and data science teams to further extend Abnormal’s lead as the most effective AI threat detection engine for enterprise email security.

Large enterprise customers have been increasingly demand cloud-native email security solutions that do not require tuning or maintenance and provide immediate value by stopping the attacks that bypass legacy secure email gateways. And the Abnormal platform deploys to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace environments in one click through native API integrations. 

The company’s AI threat detection engine uniquely analyzes a diverse set of data about people, relationships, and business context to understand abnormal behavior and block socially-engineered attacks. The engine also explains to users why an attack is blocked to provide transparency about the AI judgments applied to an environment.

KEY QUOTES:

“There is clear evidence that conventional email solutions are insufficient. The shift in attacker techniques to more personalized, socially-engineered attacks requires a different approach. No amount of threat intelligence can stop an attack that’s never been seen before. The only way to do so is through AI-based behavioral detection. This funding allows us to double down on this technology and our team and deliver immediate and lasting value to our customers.”

— Evan Reiser, Abnormal Security CEO and co-founder

“Abnormal’s AI-powered detection has autonomously stopped incredibly sophisticated attacks. It’s not only saving time for my security team, but Abnormal’s cloud platform is one of the simplest solutions that we’ve ever implemented – it took just minutes.”

— Mike Britton, Chief Security and Privacy Officer of Alliance Data

“We were blown away by the positive feedback from Fortune 500 customers using Abnormal Security to protect their organizations from the most sophisticated email attacks. Customers unanimously raved about Abnormal’s product innovation and velocity. The unparalleled traction and world-class team that the company continues to build make this a unique opportunity that we could not be more excited to join.”

— Venky Ganesan, an active cybersecurity investor and partner at Menlo Ventures