Agari gets $40 million investment to protect organizations from phishing, spoofing

More money for email security, as experts warn about the risk phishing and spoofing.

Agari, a company that uses artificial intelligence to protect organizations from email threats, announced Friday that it earned $40 million in a Series E round of funding, led by Goldman Sachs.

Companies and agencies are increasingly throwing money into email security, as malicious emails and spoofed domains are a leading cause of enterprise security issues.

Olga Kaplan, a vice president with Goldman Sachs, is joining Agari as part of the deal.

“The overwhelming majority of cyberattacks still originate via email, and are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Agari takes a fundamentally different approach by leveraging identity modeling and machine learning to prevent cyber attacks that legacy technologies simply do not stop,” Kaplan said in a statement.

Agari counts big names like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the U.S. Postal Service as customers, among others. The company says it plans to use the new funding to add to its customer base and expand in Europe and Asia.

The Foster City, Calif.-based company also wants to bolster its products and their underlying technology. It boasts that the artificial intelligence powering its platforms goes through “300 million model updates per day enabled through data from trillions of emails and billions of inboxes.”

Customers deploy Agari onto their cloud email networks to monitor for suspicious emails coming inbound to employees and going outbound from the customers’ domains.

The company says its product automates DMARC, the validation system that allows users to detect and block malicious actors trying to send fraudulent emails that look like they’re coming from the user’s domain.

According to an Agari report from January, the number of federal agencies adopting DMARC is climbing. But implementation is still a struggle for some federal contractors and the White House, although there is progress, according to the Global Cyber Alliance.

Experts continue to warn about the risk phishing poses to organizations. Emails trying to get people to click on malicious links are consistently listed as a top cause of breaches.

“Safeguarding against sophisticated email deception attacks and account takeover has become a boardroom-level mandate, with business email compromise costing companies billions of dollars each year,” said Agari CEO Ravi Khatod in a statement.

Government

• FBI officials say AI is bolstering adversaries, emphasizing need to focus on cyber basics, patching

• Feds accuse China of ‘systematic’ distillation of U.S. AI models

• CIA’s Michael Ellis says cyber intelligence is changing how the agency operates

• Jail time for Maine child in 764 marks turning point in federal law enforcement

Technology

• FCC proposes public scorecard to rate telecoms on anti-robocall efforts

• Pegasus, NoviSpy variant spyware found on devices of Serbian activists

• Wyden seeks upgraded NSA security guidance on commercial VPN use

• The Collective Cyber Defense letter wrote your next vendor questionnaire

Threats

• Chinese espionage groups swarm to exploit triple-link chain of zero-days

• Microsoft discloses two actively exploited zero-days among 974 vulnerabilities

• Russian national extradited to US for alleged involvement in bank-account takeover scheme

• Attackers exploit zero-days in consistently besieged SonicWall product

Policy

• Whistleblower says USPS deploying new, ‘untested’ IT systems governing mail-in ballots

• ‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

• Former sexual abuse victims say Grok used their images, videos to train deepfake capabilities

• Cyber threats nudge Trump to sign executive order on foreign equipment in U.S. energy infrastructure