Tessian raises $13m to make enterprise email safe with machine learning

JUN 18, 2018

Tessian, the UK-based machine intelligence start-up transforming the way enterprises secure email, today announces that it has raised $13 million (£9 million).

The Series A round was led by Balderton and existing investor, Accel. Amadeus Capital Partners, Crane, LocalGlobe, Winton Ventures and Walking Ventures also participated in the round.

Against a backdrop where enterprises are creating a growing share of the world’s data – in 2015 businesses created 30 percent of all data globally, but this is expected to soar to almost 60 per cent by 2025 — Tessian’s mission is to automatically protect individuals and enterprises from cybersecurity threats in order to keep the world’s most sensitive data and systems private and secure.

Tessian’s founders, Tom Adams, Ed Bishop and Tim Sadler, met as engineering students at Imperial College before they started their careers in investment banking for some of the world’s largest financial institutions. It was while working in finance that they saw a gap in the market to protect companies against the problem of highly sensitive information being sent to the wrong person via email, which can have severe business consequences and cause lasting reputational damage.

With the recent report from the ICO that misaddressed emails are now the number one data security incident reported to them and GDPR now in full swing, companies should make addressing this risk a top security priority.

Tim Sadler, CEO and co-founder of Tessian

The Tessian senior management team

It’s human nature to fear scary things like hackers or malware, but we often don’t think twice about the dangers behind something as familiar and ingrained as sending an email. In reality that’s where an overwhelming threat lies.

Tim Sadler, CEO and co-founder of Tessian

Suranga Chandratillake, Balderton Capital and Tim Sadler, Tessian at the 2018 Balderton CEO Collective, The Luberon, France

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.

Suranga Chandratillake, Partner, Balderton

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.

Suranga Chandratillake, Partner, Balderton

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