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Agari Secures $5M Strategic Investment

2013-03-01
PALO ALTO, CA, Agari collects terabytes of email data from sources across the Internet to create a cloud-based solution to assess, visualize, and protect against email threats.
Agari today announced 300% revenue growth in 2012, a $5 million strategic investment and the addition of two new executives. Agari's revenue growth was driven by new customer wins including the world's largest brands across financial services, ecommerce and social media. These wins were enabled by Agari's Email Trust Network which grew to more than two billion mailboxes worldwide and stops four million phish daily. In addition to the undisclosed strategic investor, existing investors Alloy Ventures, Battery Ventures, First Round Capital and Greylock Partners participated.

The addition of industry veterans Ingrum Putz as Vice President of Engineering and Vidur Apparao as Chief Technology Officer to the groundbreaking Agari engineering team will accelerate the development and delivery of the company's transformational email security solutions and will fuel wider adoption of its products by financial institutions, social media and Internet commerce companies.

"Agari is saving millions of dollars in eroded brand value and liability for our customers today-and the demand is growing as unauthorized use of brands for phishing accelerates," said Patrick Peterson, Founder and CEO, Agari. "The additional capital and leadership that Ingrum and Vidur bring will enhance Agari's growth in realizing our vision of a secure, trusted email channel."

As Agari's Vice President of Engineering, Mr. Putz leads software development, quality assurance and technical operations for Agari's subscription services. Mr. Putz is broadly recognized for his deep acumen in cloud-based security and ability to rapidly deliver sophisticated products that meet high customer expectations and solve complex problems. Mr. Putz began his career at VeriSign and was most recently vice president of engineering at Voltage Security, where he conceived and built their encrypted email cloud service.

In his role as Agari's CTO, Mr. Apparao is responsible for the research and architecture of innovative technical solutions to evolving cyber security threats including outbound email phishing. Working with Mr. Putz and other leaders of the organization, Apparao will represent the company's technical point of view to industry bodies including the DMARC organization. Formerly, Mr. Apparao was the CTO at LiveOps where he was instrumental in transforming the company to a leading cloud contact center platform.

On a daily basis, Agari protects over 2.3 billion emails, stopping over four-million suspicious emails and detecting over 40,000 malicious URLs. Global leaders in financial services, Internet commerce and social media rely on Agari to protect their brand and their customers from costly fraudulent email. Agari's rapid growth can be partially attributed to its leadership as a founding member of the DMARC Organization. DMARC helps senders and receivers technically collaborate to improve email authentication practices, and to enable receivers to reject unauthorized messages before they ever reach the inbox. Globally, DMARC protects 1.976 billion in-boxes or 60%. In the United States, 80% of inboxes are now protected by the standard.

Agari CEO Patrick Peterson will host industry leaders on a panel about the DMARC standard at the RSA Conference, Thursday February 28, 2013 in San Francisco. RSA attendees are welcome to attend. To learn how Agari can protect companies' brands and customers, please visit www.agari.com.

About Agari, Inc.

Agari collects terabytes of email data from sources across the Internet to create a cloud-based solution to assess, visualize, and protect against email threats to brands, such as phishing and other fraud. Today, Agari protects more than 65 percent of US consumer email traffic and processes more than 2.3 billion messages daily. The Agari Email Trust Network becomes more pervasive, intelligent, and powerful as more join Agari to protect email users, customers, brands, business models, and corporate and cyber infrastructure. Founded by the thought leaders behind Cisco's IronPort solutions, the Agari platform provides global brands with the tools needed to proactively protect brand reputation, eliminate email threats, protect customers and prevent the loss of sensitive data. Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Agari is backed by Alloy Ventures, Battery Ventures, First Round Capital, and Greylock Partners. Additional information is available at http://www.agari.com.
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