How an Armenian startup plans to use a new innovation to tackle the billion-dollar phishing industry
So-called “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance,” or DMARC, is a technical standard that is designed to protect the senders and recipients of email from spam, spoofing and phishing. Before you fall asleep, it’s worth pointing out that this is a booming tech sector.
What the fast-growing DMARC protocol is doing now is what “https” did for the web: making email more communication secure. There were 6 million domains using DMARC in 2021 and 10 million in 2022. It’s growing, fast.
Companies in the space include Valimai (raised $84 million) and RedSift (raised $64.8 million), among others.
And they are tackling a big problem. According to Statista, 333 billion emails are sent every day. And email remains an enormously powerful brand communication platform. But 84% of emails are spam (July 2021). Meanwhile, a vast number of cyberattacks are carried out through simple phishing emails. And yet email remains one of the few non-proprietary methods of communication online, given so much of our interactions are now effectively owned by platforms like Facebook and Google.
Back in 2016, Gerasim Hovhanisyan says he was working as an information security consultant, when he was asked to look into the aftermath of a severe email phishing attack on a multibillion dollar company.
He looked into the latest email security technologies but decided that there were a variety of solutions but none which packed the DMARC protocol into something relatively easy for businesses to use. So together with co-founder Avag Arakelyan, in 2018 they launched their startup to tackle this problem.
The resulting EasyDMARC is a B2B SaaS solution that claims to make email authentication simple for SMEs by securing domain and email infrastructure, protecting from phishing and increasing email deliverability. It does this by making sure there are security protocols for a business that stop hackers from sending phishing emails on their behalf, among others things.
The startup now says it has 30,000 clients from 130 countries and has analysed a staggering 9 billions emails.
Now, after a period of bootstrapping, EasyDMARC has raised a seed round, of $2.3 million in a round led by Acrobator Ventures (lead investor, Joachim Laqueur), Formula VC and an unnamed US-based public security company.
The deal marks a significant moment in the Armenian tech startup ecosystem, since both Hovhannisyan and Arakelyan are alumni employers of Picsart, the country’s main unicorn at this time.
