Email security company INKY raised $20 million for its Series B funding round led by Insight Partners, the company announced Thursday.
Based in College Park, INKY provides phishing protection solutions that integrate with organizations' email providers, like Office 365 or G-Suite. The company deploys its software inline in the email flow to act as an extra line of defense. Experts often cite phishing as a leading cause of data breaches.
With the threat as large as it is, it's unsurprising that the phishing protection space is somewhat crowded. INKY CEO Dave Baggett says customers are often using INKY in conjunction with other email security clients like Proofpoint or Mimecast. INKY adds value in how it's deployed, Baggett said, flagging threats before a message hits a user's inbox. The service uses methods like computer vision and natural language processing to analyze what an email looks and sounds like to root out sophisticated impersonation threats that go beyond your run-of-the-mill spam.
"The basic idea is as we see more examples of mail from each sender, INKY gets a better idea of what that sender's normal mail looks like. So things like where they usually mail from geographically, what mail infrastructure they normally use," Baggett said. "And then stylometric things extracted from the body and text of the mail, even things like grade level of writing, number of typos and so on," he added.
Phishing attempts are known to increase around holidays and other recurring events, and especially major crises like the coronavirus pandemic. Baggett said INKY has seen phishing in general triple between March and April this year. And coronavirus-themed phishing in particular is rampant, he said.
"They are exploiting really two things. One is that people are distracted. Maybe they have their kids asking when lunch is while they're trying to get through their inbox while the dog is barking. Or they're scared," Baggett said. "We're seeing COVID-19 phishing that says 'Your colleague died from COVID-19. Log in here to get the information.' Just completely evil exploitation of people."
Baggett said INKY has seen at least 40 different COVID-19 phishing variants, comparing them to "Mad Libs," where attackers use social media to figure out whom to impersonate to fool victims.
Although INKY was founded in 2008 with more of a research and incubation focus, Baggett said the company underwent several changes before settling on its current model. It's been raising money like a startup since its seed round in 2016 and is at $31.6 million in funding now.
The company plans to use the new funding to expand sales, customer relations, operations and other teams in order to more aggressively go after large enterprise customers, having closed its first few enterprise sales at the end of last year, Baggett said. The company also wants to start expanding outside of the U.S. and Canada.
Baggett said he'd been talking to investors about INKY's planned Series B round for about six months. As the economic downturn of the coronavirus took hold, Baggett said about half of the investors INKY was pitching paused discussions, but not Insight Partners, which led the round. Previous investors Gula Tech Ventures and ClearSky also participated in this round.
"With [Insight Partners] in particular, we didn't see any slowdown or hesitation at all, I think because they had been on a long process to make a bet in this area," Baggett said. "And also because—although we don't see Zoom effect where we're massively in demand—we certainty haven't seen evidence of demand slacking. ... I think the last thing you're going to cut if you're a CISO is your work-from-home security process."
This wouldn't be Insight's first bet in email security. It previously led a round for Mimecast, the aforementioned competitor, which has since gone public.
“Phishing continues to plague companies of all sizes and remains the primary vector by which attackers steal money, intellectual property, and personally identifiable information,” said Matt Gatto, managing director at Insight Partners, in a statement. “Despite the ever-increasing volume of phishing scams, incumbent vendors cannot solve this problem. INKY’s sophisticated machine learning-based approach to identifying phishing attacks provides enterprises with an effective weapon against phishing.”
