Next up in the CyLon Presents series: Cohort 3 alumni, Tessian.

Tessian helps organisations protect themselves against data loss due to misaddressed emails, and the risks of highly sensitive information being sent to the wrong person 🔑

Saving the world from awkward email mis-haps one inbox at a time….⚔️

The story of Tessian starts in 2013, when co-founders Tim Sadler, Ed Bishop and Tom Adams met as engineering students at Imperial College, London.

Each went on to join some of the world’s largest investment banks. It was while working for these financial institutions that they witnessed the severity of emailing highly sensitive information to the wrong person — and just how easily it could happen — and spotted a gap in the market for a solution.

They set out on a mission to disrupt rule-based email security. Together they formed a company named CheckRecipient (they rebranded early 2018). Their plan: to apply machine learning to large datasets in order to prevent email security threats.

Tim brought Tessian (well, technically CheckRecipient) to CyLon in 2016. He worked the CyLon network, impressing the investors, customers and partners we introduced him to over the three months of the programme, and smashed the end of programme Demo Day with this brilliant three-minute pitch.

CyLon was the just the first stepping stone to success for Tessian. Since their seed round in 2017, the Tessian team has grown from 13 to 70 people, while annual recurring revenue is up by over 400 per cent in the last 12 months. The company recently announced its Series A round led by Balderton Capital and Accel. They will use the Series A investment to grow the sales and marketing teams and to rapidly expand the product offering. Work here has already begun, and in September they launched* their newest product, Defender, to sit alongside the other two machine intelligent email products in their suite:

Guardian: This predicts misdirected emails, so sensitive data is not inadvertently sent to the wrong recipient.

Enforcer: This classifies emails as authorised or unauthorised (or to personal/malicious accounts). In a world when more and more people use freemail domains for legitimate business, a machine intelligent classifier is required.

Defender: This predicts inbound emails to prevent against strong-form impersonation spear phishing attacks.

Tessian’s USP is that its security platform is both automatic and preventative, and is the first of its kind to use machine learning in this way (we’d say another is their excellent corporate stash — anyone who’s anyone has a pair of Tessian-branded socks..). There’s no admin, data labelling or constant monitoring required — if Tessian detects something that looks like a data breach, it automatically prevents it from happening and then alerts the relevant security team.

Tessian continues to grow, and now has a presence in the US and Asia. They have clients including world-leading organisations like Schroders, Man Group and Dentons, and over 70 of the UK’s leading law firms are now using platform to protect their email networks. We can’t wait to see what’s next!

For more on Tessian, read this recent Information Age piece here or visit their website here.

*at a product launch that featured some of the best canapes we’d ever seen — including mini fish and chips served on tiny edible newspapers, which featured a story about the new Tessian Defender — launching that day!