- France-based predictive email defense Vade Secure is entering a €70 million financing agreement with General Catalyst.
Vade Secure, a France-based global leader in predictive email defense, announced recently that it entering a €70 million financing agreement with General Catalyst. Vade Secure’s predictive email defense solutions utilizes artificial intelligence (fed by data from 600 million mailboxes) for blocking targeted threats and new attacks from the first wave. And in addition, Vade Secure’s real-time threat detection capabilities enable SOCs to instantly identify new threats and orchestrate coordinated responses.
With this funding, Vade Secure said it is planning to accelerate its growth and global expansion with a focus on building out a go-to-market strategy focused on serving business customers through Managed Service Providers (MSPs). And Vade is going to invest heavily in advancing the platform’s core machine learning-based threat detection capabilities along with its native email security solution for Office 365.
In conjunction with the financing agreement General Catalyst investors, Paul Sagan (former CEO of Akamai Technologies) and Matt Brennan are joining Vade Secure’s Board. And Austin McChord — founder/former CEO of Datto and General Catalyst investor — is also joining Vade Secure’s Board.
“As an entrepreneur who built Datto from the ground up into a multi-billion dollar business, I lived and breathed MSPs. From the moment I first saw Vade Secure, I realized the company’s immense potential to be an essential piece of solving cybersecurity for MSPs. The instantly deployable O365 protection is the perfect mix of enterprise-grade security and total automation that today’s MSPs need,” said McChord
Email continues to be the #1 attack vector and results in a proliferation of targeted phishing, spear phishing, malware, and ransomware attacks around the world. And according to Accenture, the total economic value at risk of cybercrime attacks is $5.2 trillion over the next five years.
“I am truly excited about this investment from General Catalyst. It validates our strategy and, more importantly, allows us to accelerate our goal to revolutionize the email security market through the application of machine learning and a comprehensive view of threats as they emerge in real-time worldwide,” explained Vade Secure’s CEO Georges Lotigier. “With the funding, we will continue to invest in our AI-based threat detection engine and build on Vade’s leadership in email security for ISPs. In addition, we have a unique opportunity to capitalize on the market disruption caused by the industry shift from on-premise hosted email to the adoption of cloud-based email platforms. With a significant advantage in our core technology and easy-to-implement solution, we plan to rapidly become the de facto standard for Office 365 email protection, in a complement of the platform’s own security.”
Vade Secure is known for protecting enterprises and small-medium businesses (SMBs) against email-borne cyber threats targeting their employees. And Vade’s technologies protect more than half a billion inboxes across more than 5,000 global customers, including major ISPs, OEMs, and enterprises like Comcast, British Telecom, Orange, Softbank, Fujitsu Cloud Services, NTT Comm, Telstra, and Cisco.
“Since implementing Vade Secure we have gone from spam being a number one problem to having it well under control. Previously, we had daily calls to discuss unwanted and malicious emails, whereas we now have just one weekly of which this is just one part of the agenda,” noted BT’s Head of Email, Identity & Customer Data Security Simon Dawes. “The visibility delivered by Vade Secure’s email categorization is providing powerful insight into what kind of threats are targeting our customers’ inboxes. This intelligence helps to inform our overall security strategy as it continues to evolve.”
And Vade Secure has received a number of awards and recognitions recently including Cyber Defense Magazine’s 2019 InfoSec Award for Most Innovative Anti-Phishing Solution, CSO Magazine’s Hottest New Cybersecurity Products at RSA 2019, and a 5.0/5.0 score product review from SC Magazine.
Going forward, Vade Secure will continue to serve the enterprise and OEM markets. And in addition, Vade Secure CEO Georges Lotigier and his team intend to greatly expand on Vade Secure for Office 365 with a go-to-market strategy focused on selling through MSPs and aggregators for servicing SMBs across North America, Europe, and Japan.
Stephan Dietrich — General Catalyst Executive-In-Residence, co-founder/CEO of Neolane (acquired by Adobe), and current Vade Secure Board Director — is also co-investing alongside General Catalyst and will remain on the company’s Board to serve as Chairman.
“As a Board Member over the past two years, I witnessed Vade Secure’s tremendous growth and technological advances first-hand,” noted General Catalyst Executive-In-Residence (XIR) Stephan Dietrich. “I knew that it was the right time to unlock the company’s full potential by assembling the right growth equity partner and a ‘dream team’ of talent. I am happy to serve as Chairman of the Board, and I look forward to taking Vade Secure to the next level by further contributing with my Europe-to-US expansion expertise.”
