Agari, a leading cybersecurity company, today announced it raised $22 million in Series D funding to accelerate development and deployment of the Agari Email Trust Platform™, the industry’s only solution that stops targeted phishing attacks by understanding the legitimate identity of email senders and detecting imposter emails. With this round of funding, Agari has raised $44.7 million in total. The company’s customers now include many of the world’s largest enterprises, including six of the top 10 banks and five of the world’s leading social media networks. Norwest Venture Partners led the funding, with all existing investors contributing to the round.

“In order to develop our cyber security investment thesis, we regularly interview CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers) to understand their top security concerns. We consistently heard from these customers that major breaches were being attributed to targeted phishing attacks,” said Rama Sekhar, partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “When we searched for an investment opportunity in today’s crowded security market that had a proven technology to meet this challenge, along with a track record of reliability, continued innovation, and high customer satisfaction, Agari stood alone.”

Targeted phishing attacks – including targeted email attacks, spear phishing and business email compromise – pose the greatest threat to enterprise security today. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported that since January 2015, business email compromise incidents rose by 270 percent and amounted to more than $2.3 billion in losses in less than two years. Further highlighting this growing problem, Verizon’s 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 30 percent of targeted phishing attacks were opened by recipients in 2015. Agari’s unique patented technology, built on behavioral ‘trust models’, protects enterprises and their customers from email-based data breaches, financial theft, malware delivery, credential theft and ransomware. The Agari Email Trust Platform protects more than 85 percent of consumer mailboxes in the United States and analyses more than 10 billion messages per day. In 2015, Agari prevented 3.5 billion fraudulent emails from being delivered.

“Targeted email attacks are becoming a highly visible problem for consumers and corporations alike. These attacks target sensitive enterprise information resources, and today incorporate techniques beyond malicious content that make them harder to stop, such as identity deception to subvert trust. As the problem grows, so does the need for a proven email security solution to stop it in its path,” said Scott Crawford, Research Director, Information Security at 451 Research. “The timing of this funding will enable Agari to help further combat this global problem, that has now been elevated to a board-level issue.”

Founded in 2009, Agari partnered with PayPal, Yahoo! and Google to create the Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) open standard. Agari’s solutions were quickly adopted by PayPal, JP Morgan Chase, and NACHA to eliminate malicious email attacks targeting their customers’ sensitive information while also gaining unprecedented visibility into their global email ecosystems. Continuing to innovate, Agari has won numerous industry awards and worked with Microsoft and the FBI to bring down the Citadel botnet. Today, Agari’s customers include some of the largest companies in financial services, e-commerce, healthcare, logistics and B2B services. The company’s product portfolio includes Agari Enterprise Protect, the industry’s only email security solution that stops sophisticated, difficult to detect targeted phishing attacks that evade current security tools.

“Over the past several years, the cybersecurity market has grown exponentially – with new companies and products being launched every few months. Yet with all this industry focus, email attacks are continuing unabated, with growing impact,” said Patrick Peterson, founder and CEO of Agari. “Enterprises are clamoring for solutions to stop targeted email attacks to protect their corporate assets, as well as avoid the humiliating publicity that comes with these attacks. We are in a unique position: the Agari Email Trust Platform is the only proven solution to prevent these previously ‘unstoppable’ email attacks. This funding will allow us to expand our development and deployment activities, enabling both companies and consumers to once again ‘trust’ in their email.”