Schroder UK Public Private (SUPP) has announced a $6.75m investment into cybersecurity company, Tessian, as part of its $65m Series C funding round. We note that this represents the first new investment for SUPP since the appointment of Schroder Investment Management as manager on 13 December 2019, following the fallout from Woodford Patient Capital.
Tessian is raising money in order to accelerate its mission of quantifying and preventing human risk in enterprises across the globe. The Series C funding round was led by March Capital, a US-based venture growth firm, with participation from existing shareholders including Sequoia Capital, Accel, Balderton Capital and Latitude. The announcement notes that the deal values Tessian at $500m.
‘Tessian pioneering a new approach to cybersecurity
SUPP’s announcement describes Tessian as follows: “Tessian is pioneering a new approach to cybersecurity and is defining a new category of security software called Human Layer Security. For decades, cybersecurity software has focused on the machine layer – the networks, endpoints, and devices of an organization – but not the people. But employees are the gatekeepers to companies’ most sensitive systems and according to a CybSafe analysis of data from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), human error was the cause of approximately 90 percent of data breaches in 2019. To overcome the so-called “people problem” in security, Tessian uses machine learning to stop security threats and data breaches caused by people, without disrupting their workflow. It builds Behavioral Intelligence Models, tailored to every employee, by understanding each individual’s communication patterns and behaviours online. Tessian uses the models to automatically detect security threats and prevent them from turning into breaches by notifying the employee in-the-moment. Over time, these alerts help employees improve their security behaviours. When software company Adobe surveyed over 1,000 American workers for its annual email usage study, they found that people on average spend more than five hours per day checking their email. Today, Tessian secures people on email and automatically prevents threats such as phishing, business email compromise, data exfiltration and accidental data loss.”
SUPP: Schroder UK Public Private makes first new investment since manager’s December 2019 appointment