Anti-phishing startup Inky raises $20M to ramp up enterprise adoption

Anti-phishing startup Inky has raised $20 million in its Series B round of funding, led by Insight Partners.

The funding will help the company push for greater enterprise adoption and expand to international markets, including Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Inky started a decade ago with a bold mission to reinvent email with its desktop app focused on helping users better organize and filter their inboxes. The company pivoted away from its email improvement efforts in 2018 to focus on its cloud-based anti-phishing technology. A year later, it raised $5.6 million in its Series A round.

This latest investment pushes to $31.6 million the total amount Inky has raised.

Phishing is a continual headache for all organizations. These attacks rely on tricking users into thinking an email is genuine and turning over personal information or passwords. Verizon’s yearly data breach report said 22% of all breaches are caused by phishing, a technique used more than any other attack vector. Attackers also use spoofed emails to trick human resources or finance staff into turning over sensitive employee files, like W-2 tax forms, on instructions from senior leadership. These so-called business email scams have cost businesses billions of dollars a year.

Inky’s technology works by hooking into existing email systems, like Exchange, Office 365 and G-Suite and alerting users if an incoming email looks safe, unusual or malicious. The company uses machine learning and other technologies to detect if an email looks like it’s spam, a phish attempt or leveraging a security vulnerability like an XSS — or cross-site script — that can be used to steal data.

Inky says it blocks hundred of thousands of suspicious or malicious emails a month for the average customer.

“This Series B funding gives us the resources we need to serve the incredible demand we’re seeing from enterprise customers in particular, and will allow us to expand our go-to-market efforts globally,” said Inky’s co-founder and chief executive Dave Baggett.

Startups face the same phishing risks as big corporations