IRONSCALES raises $8M to support email security research and development, accelerate growth

IRONSCALES announced it has closed an $8 million Series B extension led by Chicago-based venture and growth capital firm Jump Capital. The additional funding will add to the $15 million previously contributed by current investor K1 Investment Management.

IRONSCALES plans to use the funding to further accelerate its aggressive growth strategy through market expansion and ongoing research and development of its email security platform.

As a result of the partnership, Jump Capital Partner Saurabh Sharma will join the IRONSCALES Board of Directors. Saurabh leads IT Infrastructure and Application Software investments for Jump Capital and brings a diverse background in investing, operations and product management.

“Phishing remains one of the largest attack vectors for cybercriminals. Even though enterprises are investing heavily in cloud-native security infrastructure, they still rely on legacy secure email gateway products to fight increasingly sophisticated and socially engineered phishing attacks,” said Sharma.

“IRONSCALES is a recognized industry leader in anti-phishing for new-age cloud email ecosystems and its comprehensive self-learning security platform combines advanced machine learning with human intelligence to continuously evolve with the phishing landscape.”

In conjunction with today’s funding news, IRONSCALES also announced that it has hired Matthew McNulty as SVP of Worldwide Sales. McNulty joins IRONSCALES as a seasoned sales, operations and finance expert, previously working as SVP of International Sales at security awareness training and simulated phishing platform KnowBe4.

“While we weren’t actively seeking capital, partnering with Jump was too good of an opportunity for us to pass up,” said Eyal Benishti, IRONSCALES founder and CEO.

“With this Series B extension, and with Jump and McNulty on our team, we will be able to accelerate our marketplace momentum through investments in both people and technology, helping reduce the risk from what has become a global email phishing epidemic.”

Funding builds on IRONSCALES 2020 growth momentum

The news furthers what has already been a monumental year for IRONSCALES. Already in 2020, the email security leader has scaled its North American sales and marketing teams, expanded into new territories and unveiled a number of platform updates and new tools available to customers and partners.

IRONSCALES’ biggest 2020 announcements include:

• An upgrade of Themis, IRONSCALES’ AI-driven virtual security analyst, which now has the ability to be fully autonomous in the classification and removal of email threats. With the tool, security analysts can now measurably increase the speed and accuracy of their email security through automated time-sensitive decisions on email threat mitigation.
• The industry’s first Phishing Emulator, a fully automated solution that enables security professionals to evaluate their organization’s email security defenses by relaunching real-world, unmodified phishing attacks built to bypass secure email gateways and authentication protocols.
• The deployment of natural language processing, which uses advanced machine learning and neural networks, to automatically detect and respond to the most common types of business email compromise (BEC) attacks.
• The launch of an in-app chat tool that encourages the sharing of phishing threat detection and open collaboration within security teams and amongst the global community of security analysts.

IRONSCALES helps where e-mail security hurts the most – in the inbox with post-message delivery, detection and remediation. Through a self-learning platform that provides for fast, easy and seamless collaboration, IRONSCALES puts its customers on offense, empowering them to defend against sophisticated email attack techniques automatically in a proactive and predictive manner.

Using a democratized approach to threat intelligence sharing, IRONSCALES makes anti-phishing effortless and seamless for both security professionals and end users.