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).

This Series A round was led by Balderton Capital and existing investors, 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 on email, which can have severe business consequences and cause lasting reputational damage.

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

“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,” says Tim Sadler, CEO and co-founder of Tessian (formerly Checkrecipient). “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’s Tim Sadler speaks to Suranga Chandratillake at the 2018 Balderton CEO Collective

The genius of [Tessian’s] 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

Suranga Chandratillake, Partner, Balderton

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.”Read about the announcement in CityAM.Read about the announcement in VentureBeat.Read about the announcement in Techcrunch.

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