Our Investment in Abnormal Security: Email Security for Today’s Cloud Office Environments
The world is digitizing at a rapid pace and the pandemic has accelerated this transformation. Overnight, companies went from 20 offices to 200,000 remote workers dispersed across the globe. This has also spurred a massive shift to the cloud. The adoption of cloud office platforms such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) has exploded. With that growth came the sudden expansion of attack surfaces, which organizations are now forced to defend.
Abnormal Security, the newest addition to the Menlo portfolio, protects organizations from the most sophisticated email attacks. Business Email Compromise (BEC) is one of the costliest attack vectors. It’s when an attacker hacks into a corporate e-mail account and impersonates the real owner to defraud the company, its customers, partners, and/or employees into sending money or sensitive data to the attacker’s account. It’s the single greatest cause of cybersecurity-related financial loss. In 2019, FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) recorded 23,775 complaints about BEC, which resulted in more than $1.7 billion in losses.
For every problem, there’s a solution. Abnormal’s AI-based cloud email security platform integrates with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace in seconds via native APIs. It uses a unique combination of machine learning and behavior modeling to detect account compromise and stop socially engineered email attacks such as BEC. It is an essential solution for today’s cloud office environments and an increasing number of Fortune 500 companies rely on it to protect against targeted email attacks that are consistently missed by legacy email security tools.
In our opinion, every CISO should set their sights on Abnormal as an essential investment to complete their cloud office security strategy. In a saturated market, strong product differentiation is a must. We’ve also come to learn that success goes beyond the product and if you can marry product smarts with business acumen then you have a winning formula.
One of the many reasons we were drawn to Abnormal Security was its founders’ experience and sector knowledge. Successful security companies tend to be led by experienced entrepreneurs with a proven track record. Evan and Sanjay fit that mold.
Evan Reiser is CEO and co-founder and most recently led product and machine learning teams at Twitter and previously co-founded several successful companies including Bloomspot (acquired by JP Morgan Chase, and former Menlo company) and AdStack (acquired by TellApart). Sanjay Jeyakumar serves as CTO and co-founder and is an inspiring engineering leader. He’s helped some of the world’s largest software companies, including Twitter and Google, to grow and innovate. Sanjay was also the founding engineer and architect at TellApart (acquired by Twitter for over $500 million). We have been tracking this company for over three years and have admired them for the talent they have accumulated.
We are excited to welcome Evan, Sanjay, and the entire Abnormal Security team to the Menlo portfolio. The unparalleled traction and world-class team that they continue to build make this a unique opportunity. We remain bullish on cybersecurity. The market has demonstrated resilience: an evolving threat landscape, a deluge of compliance and regulation, and a continued push to the cloud are all driving sustained momentum in the space. We believe that there is nothing normal about abnormal security. It’s truly unique.
It’s our job to pick the winners and we’re drawn to cybersecurity companies with certain attributes. We’re betting big on those that have a founder DNA, are servicing Global 2000 companies, and are building cloud-native security products.
Cybersecurity will continue to be an area of intense focus for us and Abnormal Security is the most recent addition to a burgeoning portfolio that includes Sonrai Security, Appdome, BitSight, Dedrone, and StackRox. If you are a founder of a cybersecurity company we’d love to hear from you.
