Ring the bell: GreatHorn raises $6.3M to combat new cyber threats

It feels like barely a week goes by without a new email-borne threat making the headlines. Recently, hundreds of thousands of computers were infected by the WannaCry ransomware attack, causing hospitals and businesses to shut down.

The program utilized an exploit named EternalBlue which targets Windows’ file system and is believed to have been developed by the NSA. In the end, a kill-switch in the code allowed a security researcher to easily disable the attack but many security experts feared this would be the first of many similar threats.

Their fear was justified this week when a new ransomware infected the corporate systems of banks, railways, utilities, oil companies and pharmaceutical firms across Europe and the US. “Petya” is a nastier, self-replicating threat that is delivered cloaked inside emails that appear to be normal if not examined closely.

Anti-virus has been big business for many years but companies are just now waking up the huge threat posed by email and instant message-borne attacks. Although ransomware has captured the headlines recently, virtually every major corporate hack in the last five years has taken advantage of a highly targeted email (aka “spearphishing”) to gain initial access to systems.

In late 2015 we were introduced to GreatHorn, a cyber security startup focussed on combating spearphishing and other such targeted attacks. Although the product was relatively early and the market generally hadn’t realized the magnitude of the threats they addressed, we were extremely impressed with co-founders Kevin and Ray and co-led their seed round with ff vc.

Team GreatHorn in their Boston HQ

Fast forwarding 18 months, GreatHorn now protects more than 150,000 corporate mailboxes and has extended their platform to cover chat and collaboration platforms like Slack, as well as an API that can be used to protect any 3rd party systems.

Given their progress, I’m very pleased to announce that GreatHorn has raised $6.3 million in Series A funding led by .406 Ventures and Techstars Venture Capital Fund, with participation from SoftTech VC, ff vc, and RRE Ventures. The new capital will be used to help the company meet rising customer demand, expand its R&D activities and accelerate GreatHorn’s sales and marketing efforts.