IronScales closes $15m Series B from return investor K1 Investment Management

IronScales, an advanced threat protection and anti-phishing solution, has pulled in $15m for its Series B round.

The capital injection was led by growth equity investor K1 Investment Management, a previous backer of IronScales.

Launched in 2014, IronScales aims to educate the market of email security and mitigating phishing risks. The company stated that criminal tactics like ransomware and business email compromise (BEC) have made detection, prevention and response harder.

Additionally, it claims that more in four in ten phishing emails underwent up to 521 permutations per attack over a 12-month period. Worryingly, automated phishing-as-a-service is also on the rise.

Due to the volatile state of the market, IronScales provides businesses with automated phishing response technology. IronShield is the company’s cloud-based email protection module which helps businesses defend themselves against zero-day malware, credential theft, account takeover and phishing websites.

Employees are one of the key defence lines for email phishing and to nurture this, IronScales offers a phishing awareness training system. Initially, an employee is monitored and rated on their performance through a campaign of short, staged and real-world phishing attacks. Following this, they are educated on how they can improve.

The cybersecurity company has just under 1,000 customers, over 30 employees and is partnered with 54 enterprises around the world.

Following the close of the round, the company aims to further its efforts of decentralising communities by encouraging the collective sharing of information through its platform. This will help companies to proactively prepare against attacks via automatic detection and response.

Secondly, IronScales is hoping to boost its AI capabilities and utilise the technology in new ways.

In a company blog post IronScales said, “Looking ahead, we have a lot left to accomplish as we lead the charge towards the autonomous virtual analyst. Ultimately, we envision email security to one day be fully autonomous, AI powered, capable of handling phishing incidents at a clip that humans cannot. But before we can reach full autonomy, we must continue to decentralize threat intelligence sharing.”

The company previously closed its Series A round on $6.5m in 2017 with commitments from K1 Investment Management and RDC.

Since the RegTech closed the round, IronScales strengthened its advanced malware and URL/link protection to safeguard malicious inbound emails. It also launched an AI-driven virtual email analyst to determine a verdict on suspicious email incidents in real-time.

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