Tessian (formerly CheckRecipient) is going from strength to strength and today (18 June) announces that it has raised $13 million (£9 million) in a Series A round led by Balderton Capital and existing investors, Accel. Amadeus Capital Partners, Crane, LocalGlobe, Winton Ventures and Walking Ventures also participated in the round.
Since their seed round last year, the Tessian team has grown from 13 to 50 people, while annual recurring revenue is up by over 400 per cent in the last 12 months. The company, which counts Dentons and Clyde & Co among its clients, will use the Series A investment to rapidly expand its product offering and grow its business by increasing the size of its sales and marketing teams.
The UK-based machine intelligence start-up is transforming the way enterprises secure email, analysing enterprise email networks to understand normal and abnormal email sending patterns and behaviours. Tessian then detects anomalies in outgoing emails and warns users about potential mistakes, before the email is sent.
“With GDPR at the forefront of every organisation’s minds, Clyde & Co is focused on building a resilient approach to keep our client data confidential and secure,” said Chris White, global CIO at Clyde & Co.
“The speed and ease of deployment of Tessian has been unparalleled by any other solution we’ve dealt with, and has been our quickest GDPR win to date. Misaddressed emails are a major cybersecurity problem that all organisations have to deal with, but trying to train human error out of employees is near impossible. Tessian’s machine intelligence plays a vital role in helping mitigate these kinds of errors and ensure that customer data remains secure and private.”
Unlike legacy rule-based technologies, Tessian requires no admin from security teams and no end-user behaviour change. The Tessian platform can be deployed in under an hour and provides immediate historical reports that show how many misaddressed emails an organisation has sent prior to the installation date.
“What Tessian have done – and this is why we are so excited about them – is apply machine intelligence to understand how humans communicate with each other and use that deeper understanding to secure enterprise email networks,” says Balderton Capital partner Suranga Chandratillake. “The genius of this approach is that while the product focus today is on email – by far the most used communication channel in the corporate enterprise – their technology can be applied to all communication channels in time. And, as we all communicate in larger volumes and on more channels, that represents a vast opportunity.”
As part of the investment, Balderton partner Chandratillake and Accel partner Luciana Lixandru join the board.