email-security
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KnowBe4 Built a $4.6 Billion Business by Sending Employees Fake Phishing Emails
The Clearwater company made human error measurable, trainable and billable. Then a fake North Korean hire slipped through its own interviews - and gave the security trainer its most convincing lesson yet.
Fortra Bought a Cybersecurity Arsenal. Now It Has to Make the Pieces Talk.
The company once helped operators run overnight jobs on IBM machines. Four decades and a long acquisition spree later, it is trying to turn a cabinet of famous security tools into one coherent defense - while learning what happens when one trusted product becomes the way in.
ZeroBounce Spent $3 Million Learning Which Marketing Channels to Kill
A founder ignored partners who called email validation a waste of time, then spent roughly $3 million testing how to sell it. The result is a useful lesson in narrow wedges, fast failures and the unglamorous machinery behind the inbox.
Guardz Tried Selling Cybersecurity to Small Businesses. The Smarter Business Was Selling Through Their IT People
The startup's first route to market sputtered. Its 2023 pivot to MSPs turned that miss into a useful lesson: for small-business security, the trusted reseller may matter as much as the software.
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Sixscape Communications
Sixscape Communications is a Singapore-based cybersecurity vendor specializing in Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) automation and post-quantum readiness. Founded in 2014 by cryptography veteran Lawrence Hughes, the company builds digital certificate-based products for secure email (S/MIME), password-less authentication, IoT device identity and unified communications. Its patented Identity Registration Protocol (IRP), assigned IANA port 4604, automates the request, issuance and management of X.509 certificates so enterprises can deploy trusted digital identities in seconds rather than weeks. Sixscape sells through a 100% partner-centric model spanning system integrators, resellers and certificate authorities, and positions its IDcentral platform for certificate lifecycle management and cryptographic posture management in a market bracing for shorter TLS certificate lifespans and the migration to quantum-safe algorithms.
SolCyber
SolCyber is a Dallas-based managed security services provider that packages the tools, threat detection, and human-led response mid-market and enterprise companies need into a single subscription program. Founded in 2021 and incubated by ForgePoint Capital, it positions itself as a "modern MSSP" - consolidating endpoint, email, identity, SOC/SIEM, security awareness training, mobile protection, and even cyber insurance under one vendor and one contract, so customers don't have to assemble and manage a stack of point products themselves.
Check Point Software Technologies
Check Point Software Technologies is an Israeli cybersecurity company founded in 1993 that pioneered the modern firewall with its stateful inspection technology. Today it runs the Infinity platform - a unified, AI-powered security architecture spanning network (Quantum), cloud (CloudGuard), and workspace (Harmony) - protecting more than 100,000 organizations across roughly 60 countries. Publicly traded on NASDAQ as CHKP, it reported about $2.73 billion in 2025 revenue.
SecLogic
SecLogic is a Boston-based cybersecurity company building an AI-driven cyber risk orchestration platform for the cloud era. Its two flagship products - CyberQ Shield, an agentless Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) that finds and auto-remediates misconfigurations and vulnerabilities across AWS, Azure, GCP and beyond, and CyberQ ORO, an Organization Risk Orchestration tool that quantifies human risk through multi-vector phishing simulation and awareness training - aim to give security leaders a single pane of glass across both their machines and their people. Founded in 2021 and backed by pre-seed funding, SecLogic operates across the US, Europe and India.
Proofpoint
Proofpoint is a cybersecurity and compliance company that protects organizations against the threats that target people - email attacks, data loss, and insider risk. Founded in 2002, it became the first SaaS-based cybersecurity vendor to cross $1B in annual revenue, was taken private by Thoma Bravo for $12.3B in 2021, and today runs a 'human-centric' security platform spanning email defense, data security, and identity threat protection used by a majority of the Fortune 100.
Trustifi
Trustifi is a cloud-based, AI-driven email security company that protects organizations from phishing, business email compromise, data leaks and compliance failures. Its one-stack platform pairs Inbound Shield threat detection with Outbound Shield one-click encryption and One-Click Compliance, making enterprise-grade email protection simple enough for small businesses and the managed service providers that serve them. Founded by Rom Hendler and Idan Udi Edry, the company raised a $25M Series A in 2025 to scale its channel-first, AI-powered platform.
Doppel
Doppel is an AI-native security platform for social engineering defense. It protects brands, executives, and employees from AI-powered impersonation, phishing, and fraud by detecting threats across social media, domains, marketplaces, and the dark web, correlating attack signals into a unified Threat Graph, and automating takedowns of attacker infrastructure. Founded in 2022 by Kevin Tian and Rahul Madduluri, the company analyzes over a billion indicators daily and protects dozens of Fortune 500 brands.
Rom Hendler
Rom Hendler is the CEO and co-founder of Trustifi, an AI-driven email security platform that wraps encryption, data loss prevention, and security awareness training into one product built for managed service providers and mid-sized businesses. He took an unlikely path to cybersecurity, spending more than a decade as a marketing and operations executive in the casino and hospitality world (CMO at Las Vegas Sands, leadership roles at The Venetian and The Palazzo) before building a travel-tech startup and then turning his attention to the most-attacked surface in the enterprise: the inbox. Under his leadership Trustifi raised a $25M Series A in June 2025 led by Camber Partners and Hendler has been named a CRN Channel Chief four years running.
At-Bay
At-Bay is an InsurSec company that sells cyber insurance alongside the security tools, monitoring, and incident response needed to actually prevent claims. By bundling underwriting with active risk management, the company has positioned itself as both insurer and security partner for small and mid-sized businesses.
Material Security
Material Security is a San Francisco cloud workspace security company that protects email, files, and accounts inside Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Founded in 2017 by three ex-Dropbox engineers, it assumes attackers will eventually get in - and locks down the sensitive data they came for, instead of stacking yet another perimeter.
Rohit Dixit
Rohit Dixit is the Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Officer at Proofpoint, the human-centric cybersecurity company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. With over 30 years of experience spanning SaaS, technology, and technology-enabled services, Dixit oversees Proofpoint's global customer success, professional services, managed services, and technical support teams. He joined Proofpoint in February 2024 from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where he transformed a $1 billion advisory and professional services business into a record profit-generating unit. His career arc spans continents - from ESSEN Computers in India to oil fields in Kuwait, Egypt, and Turkmenistan with Halliburton, to strategy consulting at A.T. Kearney, to the C-suite of one of the world's leading cybersecurity firms.
Sumit Dhawan
Sumit Dhawan is the CEO of Proofpoint, a leading cybersecurity company protecting over 85 Fortune 100 companies with $2B+ in ARR. With 25+ years building enterprise software businesses at Citrix, Instart, and VMware (where he drove $13B in revenue as President), Dhawan joined Proofpoint in November 2023 with a mandate to unify human-centric security and grow toward $5B ARR by 2030. He is known for championing the idea that 95% of cybersecurity failures trace to human error - and that defending people is the only real way to defend organizations.
Xing Xin
Xing Xin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Upfort (formerly Paladin Cyber), a San Francisco-based platform that unifies cybersecurity and cyber insurance into a single solution for small and medium-sized businesses. With a background in management consulting, AI startups, and a childhood spent building computers for neighbors, Xin co-founded Upfort after watching a close friend's accounting firm get destroyed by ransomware in 2017. Under his leadership, Upfort now serves over 25,000 companies, has processed more than $100M in cyber insurance premiums annually, and has been shown to reduce the likelihood of security incidents by 81%.
Abhishek Agrawal
Abhishek Agrawal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Material Security, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity company that pioneered zero-trust protection for cloud email and collaboration environments. A Princeton-trained engineer who attended college at 16 and later earned his MBA from Harvard Business School as a Baker Scholar (top 5%), Agrawal co-founded Material Security in 2017 alongside former Dropbox colleagues Ryan Noon and Chris Park, inspired by the 2016 John Podesta email breach. Under his leadership, Material Security reached unicorn status ($1.1B valuation) after a $100M Series C in May 2022 led by Founders Fund, with backing from Andreessen Horowitz, Elad Gil, and Snowflake Ventures. The platform protects organizations like OpenAI, Anthropic, Reddit, Lyft, Roblox, and DoorDash against email-based threats and data loss in Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
Scott Weiss
Scott Weiss is a Silicon Valley veteran who was employee #13 at Hotmail, co-founded and sold IronPort Systems to Cisco for $830 million, and joined Andreessen Horowitz as its fourth general partner in 2011. Known for candid writing about leadership, parenting, and the hard trade-offs of startup life, he stepped back from new investments at a16z in 2016 to prioritize family before his three children left for college.
Scott Banister
Scott Banister is a serial entrepreneur and prolific angel investor who co-founded IronPort Systems (acquired by Cisco for $830M), was the first outside investor in PayPal, and is credited by insiders with conceiving the paid keyword search advertising model that spawned the entire Google AdWords ecosystem. With 100+ investments spanning Uber, SpaceX, DeepMind, Facebook, and Affirm - most at seed stage - he is one of the most consequential yet least-known members of the PayPal Mafia.