Email security startup Agari raises $22 million to help enterprises fight phishing attacks
Email security company Agari has raised $22 million in Series D funding. The San Mateo, Calif.-based startup, which specializes in preventing "malvertising" campaigns and targeted phishing attacks, has raised $44.7 million in total.
Agari founder and CEO Patrick Peterson said the latest funding round will be used for further development of its core platform, the Agari Email Trust Platform, and ramping up enterprise deployments.
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"Over the past several years, the cybersecurity market has grown exponentially -- with new companies and products being launched every few months," Peterson said in prepared remarks. "Yet with all this industry focus, email attacks are continuing unabated, with growing impact."
Founded in 2009, Agari perviously partnered with PayPal, Yahoo and Google to create the Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) authentication protocol. Agari also claims to have worked with Microsoft and the FBI to bring down the Citadel botnet back in 2013.
Agari's current customers include PayPal, Box, Facebook, Groupon and LinkedIn. The startup is backed by Alloy Ventures, Battery Ventures, First Round Capital, Greylock Partners, Norwest VenturePartners and Scale Venture Partners.
Looking at the bigger picture, phishing attacks may seem like the most basic weapon of choice when it comes to data breaches, but studies have shown that the method is still immensely popular among hackers. In Verizon's most recent Data Breach Investigations Report, 89 percent of the data breaches tracked came about courtesy of phishing and stolen credentials.
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