Sublime Security, a cybersecurity startup based in D.C., has raised $20 million in a Series A round to scale up its fight against email scams generated by artificial intelligence.
The round was led by European-based venture capital firm Index Ventures, an early investor in companies like Slack Technologies, Dropbox and Robinhood Markets Inc. Decibel Partners of Palo Alto, California, San Francisco-based Slow Ventures and Crowdstrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch also participated in the funding round, which brought Sublime's lifetime funding to $30 million.
Founded by ex-Department of Defense hacker Josh Kamdjou and Ian Thiel, former head of customer growth at Alto Pharmacy, Sublime uses an AI-powered detection engine to help companies and their employees prevent phishing scams by monitoring their typical email use and flagging anomalies in their inboxes. Its clients include such big-name companies as Reddit, Spotify and British energy giant Centrica.
Sublime was founded in 2019 and emerged from stealth mode last year. It has about 20 employees.
Its core product is free, offering protection against threats like malware, ransomware, phishing and impersonation on up to 100 mailboxes. The paid version offers more support and monitoring services, with costs ranging from around $30,000 annually to nearly $3 million, depending on the number of active mailboxes it's monitoring.
Key to Sublime's AI approach is that it can learn from experiences. When it successfully defends a customer from a phishing attack, it can apply that knowledge to protect other customers from similar attacks.
Kamdjou said in an interview Wednesday that the funds from the Series A round would be used to improve its core products and grow its base of both free and paid users. He added that the company is offering its paid service to political campaigns for free this election season and that it has already partnered with one major political campaign.
"We hope that Sublime can be used to protect democracy," he said.
According to Kamdjou, advancements in generative AI tools like ChatGPT have made it easier for hackers to create believable malicious emails aimed at scamming companies or employees out of money. Compromised business emails cost businesses and individuals nearly $3 billion in 2023, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Report.
In addition to the funding, Sublime also announced the launch of Attack Score, a new feature aimed at helping security analysts prioritize which email threats to protect against by scoring email attacks based on their level of sophistication.
