- Human layer security company Tessian announced it raised $65 million in Series C funding at a valuation of over $500 million. These are the details.
Tessian — a human layer security company — announced recently that it raised $65 million in Series C funding. With this round of funding, the company is going to accelerate its goal of quantifying and preventing human risk in global enterprises along with empowering people to do their best work without security getting in the way.
This round of funding was led by March Capital. And existing investors Accel, Balderton Capital, Latitude, and Sequoia Capital also participated in the Series C funding round along with new investor Schroder Adveq. This round of funding brings Tessian’s total funding to-date over $120 million. And the deal values Tessian at $500 million.
Tessian is known for pioneering a new approach to cybersecurity and defining a new category of security software called Human Layer Security. And now 90% of today’s data breaches are caused by some form of human error because, for decades, cybersecurity software has focused on the machine layer of an organization and not the most vulnerable asset: the people.
Tessian uses machine learning to stop data breaches and security threats caused by human error – without disrupting employee workflow. And it builds Behavioral Intelligence Models tailored to every employee by analyzing individuals’ communication patterns and behaviors online. Plus Tessian uses the models to automatically detect security threats and prevents them from turning into breaches by notifying the employee of the risk in-the-moment. Over time, the alerts essentially help employees improve their security behaviors.
Now Tessian secures people on email where they spend over 40% of their time at work and automatically prevents threats like phishing, business email compromise, data exfiltration and accidental data loss. And after being deployed Tessian, enterprises see on average an 84% reduction in data exfiltration and phishing simulation click-through rates drop to less than 1%.
Tessian now has about 350 global customers across the legal, financial services, healthcare and technology sectors including Affirm, Investec and RealPage.
With the new funding round, Tessian will expand its platform’s capabilities, helping companies replace their secure email gateways and legacy data loss prevention solutions, and will soon expand beyond email to secure other interfaces like messaging, web and collaboration platforms. And Tessian will also use the funding to triple its rapidly growing employee base, with a particular focus on growing its sales team in North America.
Tessian’s funding announcement comes on the heels that Ramin Sayer, CEO and president of Sumo Logic, has joined Tessian’s Board of Directors.
KEY QUOTES:
“The security of our operations and data is paramount to the success of Arm, and we’re committed to empowering our people to make sound security decisions while doing their jobs effectively. The concept of human layer security is becoming a critical part of doing business today. Tessian enables us to reduce risk across the organization by providing valuable tools and knowledge to not only stop threats like advanced phishing attacks and accidental data loss, but also continually improve the security behaviors of our teams as the threat landscape evolves.”
— Tim Fitzgerald, CISO at Arm (customer)
“Human activity – whether inadvertent or malicious – is the leading cause of data breaches. In Tessian, we found a best-in-class solution that automatically stops threats in real-time, without disrupting the normal flow of business. It is rare to hear such overwhelmingly positive feedback from CISOs and business users alike. We came to the same conclusion; Tessian is rapidly emerging as the leader in human layer security for the enterprise.”
— Jamie Montgomery, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at March Capital
“In the same way we have firewalls to secure networks, and endpoint detection and response platforms to secure devices, enterprises now need advanced security technology to secure their people. People make 35,000 decisions every day; it just takes one wrong decision or one instance of human error for an employee to cause a catastrophic security breach. We’re tackling the biggest threat to enterprise security, and are thrilled to partner with March Capital on our Series C and have them join our mission to secure the human layer.”
— Tim Sadler, Co-Founder and CEO at Tessian
