News
Tessian Raises $65M Series C
May 2021 by Marc Jacob
Tessian announces that it has raised $65 million in Series C venture capital funding to accelerate its mission of quantifying and preventing human risk in global enterprises, and empowering people to do their best work without security getting in the way.
The round is led by March Capital, a venture-growth firm which has previously invested in cybersecurity unicorns such as CrowdStrike and KnowBe4. Existing Tessian investors Accel, Balderton Capital, Latitude and Sequoia Capital also participated in the Series C funding round, along with new investor Schroder Adveq, bringing Tessian’s total funding to-date over $120 million. The deal values Tessian at $500 million.
Tessian is pioneering a new approach to cybersecurity and defining a new category of security software called Human Layer Security. Today, 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.
While organizations have traditionally relied on training programs or restricting people’s access to data and systems to overcome the so-called “people problem” in security, Tessian uses machine learning to stop data breaches and security threats caused by human error - without disrupting employee workflow. It builds Behavioral Intelligence Models, tailored to every employee, by analyzing individuals’ communication patterns and behaviors online. 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, these alerts help employees improve their security behaviors.
Today, Tessian secures people on email - where they spend over 40% of their time at work - and automatically prevents threats such as phishing, business email compromise, data exfiltration and accidental data loss. After deploying Tessian, enterprises see, on average, an 84% reduction in data exfiltration and phishing simulation click-through rates drop to less than 1%.
The need for greater visibility of human-activated security risks, and mitigations of these threats, was brought into sharp focus last year following the shift to remote work. Research revealed that employees were less likely to follow safe data practices when working from home, while the number of phishing attacks doubled in 2020. In fact, in the last year, Tessian tripled its Fortune 500-level customer base as enterprises required a solution that could protect them against human layer security threats. Tessian now has approximately 350 global customers across the legal, financial services, healthcare and technology sectors including Affirm, Investec and RealPage.
With the new funding, 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. 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 closely follows the news that Ramin Sayer, CEO and president of Sumo Logic, has joined Tessian’s Board of Directors.
