GreatHorn, the cybersecurity solution for cloud communications platforms, today announced it has secured a $6.3 million Series A funding round from Techstars Venture Capital Fund and .406 Ventures, with participation from existing investors including ff Venture Capital, SoftTech Ventures and RRE Ventures. The capital will help the company meet rising customer demand, expand its R&D activities and accelerate GreatHorn's sales and marketing efforts. As part of the financing, .406 Ventures Partner, Greg Dracon and Techstars Ventures Partner Ari Newman, will join GreatHorn's board of directors.

"Techstars Venture Capital Fund invests in the most innovative and disruptive Techstars companies to fuel their success and we believe GreatHorn is helping solve a major cybersecurity challenge facing all parts of society," said Newman. "Advanced and targeted social engineering threats represent one of the most pernicious and dangerous challenges to organizations in both the public and private sector. GreatHorn brings fresh thinking and a cloud-native, intelligent platform that can protect these organizations. We've been thrilled with the progress and execution GreatHorn has shown over the last few years and are excited to step up our investment in the company."

Businesses today use a wide variety of cloud-based communication platforms, including Slack, Skype, Office 365 and G Suite, that provide workers with enhanced collaboration capabilities. Employees often believe that messages sent through these platforms are secure and cybercriminals have exploited this trust to steal critical data. This is a large part of the reason for the SANS Institute finding that 95 percent of all attacks on enterprise networks are the result of successful spear phishing. While enterprises have made major investments in perimeter-based cybersecurity technologies and security awareness training for their employees, automation presents the best opportunity to close the cybersecurity skills gap and overcome today's security challenges in an increasingly cloud-driven world. For instance, GreatHorn projects that automation can reduce an enterprise security team's phishing investigation workload by more than 300 hours per week.

"GreatHorn is at the forefront of next-generation cybersecurity, understanding that changing human behavior is difficult and that security awareness training is not nearly enough for employees faced with sophisticated phishing techniques that look real from presumably trusted contacts," said Dracon. "GreatHorn has architected a new way of securing cloud communications from the ground up and we're excited to work together as the company accelerates its growth and becomes a major cybersecurity player."

GreatHorn provides enterprises with comprehensive, cloud-native protection against message-based threats, driven by machine learning and automated response capabilities.

The company's Inbound Email Security platform uniquely provides the ability to identify and shut down these attacks before damage occurs without the risk of a traditional network routing solution or the limitations of perimeter blocking. This new approach has gained the company attention from cybersecurity experts as GreatHorn was a finalist for the 2017 RSAC Innovation Sandbox competition. GreatHorn was also named in Gartner's May 2017 "Cool Vendors in Cloud Security 2017" report.

In addition, the company's Messaging Security offering provides best-in-class protection from advanced threats in ChatOps systems like Slack, helping organizations identify and remediate imposter apps and bots, catch and respond to credential loss events, and enforce content policies across multiple channels automatically.

"GreatHorn has experienced tremendous growth and this investment will help us scale operations to the next level," said GreatHorn Co-Founder and CEO Kevin O'Brien. "Communication security is where enterprises will define themselves: they will be known either for using cloud platforms to empower their employees to collaborate more safely and effectively than ever before, or they will be known for being breached, when attackers and criminals target those same employees and get past their legacy security tools. GreatHorn is designed from the ground up to work within these new environments to enable the former and prevent the latter, with the first truly cloud-native communication security platform."

Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner's research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About GreatHorn
GreatHorn is the cybersecurity solution for cloud communications platforms.

The company's flagship product is the first and only solution that can automatically detect and remediate targeted social engineering attacks in today's leading communication systems, including Google Apps, Office 365 and Slack.

With its proprietary dataset built from hundreds of millions of uniquely analyzed threats, GreatHorn combines the intelligence, fidelity, and precision necessary to prevent attacks from becoming breaches. For more information on the company, visit www.GreatHorn.com or you can follow GreatHorn on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.