Abnormal Security Raises $50 Million in Series B Funding Led by Menlo Ventures to Accelerate Enterprise Adoption of Leading AI-Driven Email Security Platform

Significant Investment Comes Amidst 3x Increase in Fortune 500 Customer Base During 2020; Company Doubling Down on AI-based Threat Detection Engine and Scaling Enterprise Support

Abnormal Security, a next-generation email security company, announced that it raised $50 million in Series B venture capital funding. Led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from early investor Greylock, the round brings Abnormal’s total funding to $75 million.

Abnormal is disrupting the market by using AI to reinvent email security. The funding comes amidst record-setting company growth during 2020, fueled by the growing importance of email security as enterprises shift to remote work. Since the start of the year, Abnormal tripled its Fortune 500-level customer base and drove a 3x year-over-year increase in annual recurring revenue. The company is using the new funding to double the size of its machine learning and data science teams to further extend Abnormal’s lead as the most effective AI threat detection engine for enterprise email security.  

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Large enterprise customers increasingly demand cloud-native email security solutions that do not require tuning or maintenance and provide immediate value by stopping the attacks that bypass legacy secure email gateways. The Abnormal platform deploys to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace environments in one click through native API integrations. Its AI threat detection engine uniquely analyzes a diverse set of data about people, relationships and business context to understand abnormal behavior and block socially-engineered attacks. The engine also clearly explains to users why an attack is blocked to provide transparency about the AI judgments applied to an environment. 

“Abnormal’s AI-powered detection has autonomously stopped incredibly sophisticated attacks,” said Mike Britton, Chief Security and Privacy Officer of Alliance Data. “It’s not only saving time for my security team, but Abnormal’s cloud platform is one of the simplest solutions that we’ve ever implemented – it took just minutes.”

“We were blown away by the positive feedback from Fortune 500 customers using Abnormal Security to protect their organizations from the most sophisticated email attacks,” said Venky Ganesan, an active cybersecurity investor and partner at Menlo Ventures. “Customers unanimously raved about Abnormal’s product innovation and velocity. The unparalleled traction and world-class team that the company continues to build make this a unique opportunity that we could not be more excited to join.”

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Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks represent the single greatest cause of cybersecurity-related financial loss, according to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Furthermore, according to Abnormal Security research, BEC attack volume increased 15% from Q2 to Q3 2020. 

“There is clear evidence that conventional email solutions are insufficient,” said Evan Reiser, Abnormal Security CEO and co-founder. “The shift in attacker techniques to more personalized, socially-engineered attacks requires a different approach. No amount of threat intelligence can stop an attack that’s never been seen before. The only way to do so is through AI-based behavioral detection. This funding allows us to double down on this technology and our team and deliver immediate and lasting value to our customers.”

Abnormal’s investors have fully committed to the $50M Series B round of funding. The company has already closed the initial transaction and expects to close the final tranche in the coming weeks.

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