Egress raises $40 million

Thanks to VentureBeat – For agencies dealing with sensitive data, cybersecurity has arguably never been more important. Enterprises that discover a data breach within the first 100 days spend about $1 million less on average than those that uncover it later on, according to the Ponemon Institute. In a recent study, 60 percent of 200 security leaders surveyed indicated that their organizations fell prey to at least one social engineering attack in the past year.

Egress today announced that it has secured $40 million in a Series C round led by FTV Capital. Existing backer AlbionVC participated in the round, which also saw FTV partner Kyle Griswold join Egress’ board of directors.

Pepper, who serves as CEO, said the new capital would be used to build on growth in Europe and expand Egress’ Boston office to as many as 50 employees by mid-2019. It will also go toward accelerating the development of “new technology” across the company’s portfolio.

“Today’s heightened security threats, combined with an increasingly complex regulatory landscape, means that organizations face considerable risk from data breaches, resulting in reputational damage and significant financial loss,” he said. “At Egress, we help businesses mitigate this risk by wrapping security around the user and managing their experience using machine learning and AI.”

Tony Pepper, John Goodyear, and Neil Larkins thought there had to be a better way to protect mission-critical information. They founded Egress, a London-headquartered startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the risk of data loss and exposure. With offices in Boston and Toronto, 500 percent revenue growth over the past four years, and over 5 million users across 2,000 enterprise and government clients, their company — which only four years ago raised $3.6 million in Series A funding — is poised for global expansion.

For example, Secure Vault — Egress’ email compliance solution — analyzes messages and lets admins drill down into dates, users, metadata, and attachments using a search function purpose-built for exposing weak data links. Egress’ Secure Workspace, meanwhile, offers features such as full auditing and controlled release, in addition to user role assignment, detailed access logs, customizable templates, and integration with Microsoft’s Office 365 and other productivity platforms. The startup’s document security classification add-in for Microsoft Office automatically encrypts classified data when sharing and allows dynamic policy-based control and document fingerprinting. And Egress’ online forms platform — Secure Web Form — boasts built-in sender verification and file type control, giving managers fine-grain control over the filing and submission flow.