Material Security raises $40M to expand business operations and R&D

Material Security has secured $40M in Series B funding led by Silicon Valley solo capitalist Elad Gil, the angel investor behind Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe and Square. Andreessen Horowitz, as well as several individual tech industry leaders and investors participated in the round, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $62M.

“In the last few months, we have seen the SolarWinds and Hafnium email breaches cost governments and private organizations billions of dollars as they seek to identify and undo malicious attacks,” said Ryan Noon, CEO and cofounder, Material Security. “As hackers continue to intensify their efforts, organizations must look beyond perimeter-only security – aka the beloved firewall – and extend zero trust security to every mailbox, protecting email before, during, and after everything from minor incidents to major breaches.”

Material Security was founded in 2017 in response to the infamous 2016 election email breaches. The company launched its full product suite in 2020 and has since experienced a 472% growth in revenue and nearly quadrupled its customer base. The new funding will allow Material Security to expand business operations to additional geographies, as well as aggressively expand R&D.

“Email security is an urgent, global issue and Material Security is a long-due and much-needed innovator in the space, protecting end-users from attacks that could bring down a network, a company or a government,” said Elad Gil, entrepreneur and investor. “As an early investor in the company, I have witnessed its approach to protecting email work time and again for some of today’s most successful organizations. Material Security is uniquely positioned to deliver the type of security needed to stop today’s – and tomorrow’s – hackers.”

The Material Security product suite delivers admin visibility and control, account takeover prevention, anti-phishing and data leak prevention services. Specifically, Material Security offers:

• Visibility and control: Material identifies common email security risks and pairs them with one-click remediations across the product suite. Customers benefit from increased visibility with real-time message search supported by robust data infrastructure.
• Leak prevention: Hackers with access to a mailbox are blocked from stealing a huge archive of sensitive, personal data.
• Account takeover prevention: Hackers with access to a mailbox can’t reset passwords to other apps and steal money, data and sensitive information.
• Phishing herd immunity: Ordinary users can automatically protect their entire organization from its weakest links (and even train their colleagues to be more vigilant).

“Email is a treasure trove for hackers as it represents the largest repository of enterprise data,” said Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and Material Security board member. “Today’s organizations – regardless of size or industry – are actively looking for a technology that can protect everyday users from a relentless future of digital plundering and Material Security is poised to be this solution.”