Annual revenue up by 400% in 12 months, a team that’s gone from 13 to 50 people, a client list boasting the likes of global law firms Dentons and Clyde & Co and asset management powerhouse Schroders and the cherry on this particular tech-cake is that they’ve just raised $13m (£9m).
The Series A funding round was led by Balderton Capital and existing investors Accel.
Not bad for former engineering-students-turned-investment-bankers Tom Adams, Ed Bishop and Tim Sadler. While working for some of the world’s leading financial institutions, they found a gaping hole in the market that needed to be filled, and quick.
‘We saw data loss all the time on email channels, often through inadvertent behaviour or at times through people sending it to their personal email. The banks have enormous amounts of money to spend on email security so we thought ‘why is this still a problem,’ said Tessian CEO Tim Sadler.
In 2015, businesses created around 30% of global data. By 2025 that number is expected to hit 60% and with so much sensitive data being generated, some of it will end up in the wrong hands.
What Do They Do Again?
Tessian was formed as CheckRecipient with the mission to ‘automatically protect individuals and enterprises from cyber-security threats in order to keep the world’s most sensitive data and systems private and secure.’
Writing in City AM, journalist Emily Nicolle said: ‘Tessian’s machine learning software protects companies against the problem of highly sensitive information being sent to the wrong person on email, by analysing past behaviours to understand normal (and abnormal) email sending patterns.’
Ask anyone what the most likely cause of data loss is and 90% will say ‘being hacked’. Actually this isn’t true. Right now, the number one data security incident reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is misaddressed emails.
‘Companies should make addressing this risk a top security priority. 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.
Tessian CEO & Co-Founder Tim Sadler
Put simply, when you send an email, Tessian’s software checks to see if you’re accidentally sending it to the wrong person or if you are intentionally sending it to an unauthorised person.
The Future’s Bright, The Future’s Tessian
This latest round of investment will enable Tessian to quickly expand its product offering and grow business by increasing headcount in sales and marketing teams in their new swanky Liverpool Street HQ.
Right now the software works with email but the technology has the incredible potential to evolve to cover instant messaging, voice and the myriad tech entry points for the communication channels we use on a daily basis.
Suranga Chandratillake, partner at Balderton Capital who joins the Tessian board as part of the investment deal puts it very simply – ‘techniques like machine-learning create a framework that computers can use to understand what normal behaviour looks like. Once you know normal, you can spot abnormal.’
However as you know, we like to leave the last word to the satisfied end-user, this time it’s Chris White, Global CIO at Clyde & Co:
‘[We are] focused on building a resilient approach to keep our client data confidential and secure. 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.’
For all things Tessian, email info@koncisesolutions.com or call +44 (0) 20 7078 0789 and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Have a good week.
Koncise Solutions
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