The new funding accelerates go-to-market (GTM) and technology integrations for the generative
AI platform that defends against phishing and impersonation
SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 22, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Bolster, a leader in multi-channel phishing protection, announced a $14 million Series B financing round led by new investor M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. Existing investors Thomvest Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Liberty Global Ventures, Cheyenne Ventures, Cervin Ventures, and Transform Capital also participated. The financing brings Bolster’s total funding to over $40 million.
Over 90% of all cyberattacks begin with phishing, according to the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency, and nearly 43% of all phishing attacks in Q4 2023 were on social media platforms, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group.
Assisted by AI, attackers deploy sophisticated phishing and impersonation attacks across all digital business channels. To respond to the growing digital threats, businesses need to leverage leading AI security vendors, like Bolster, which supports over 120 customers including some of the world’s most well-known brands. Bolster uniquely detects and eradicates phishing and impersonation attacks as they weave across malicious websites, mobile applications, social media platforms, and messaging tools.
“Having observed the email security landscape for over twenty years, it’s evident that traditional methods are failing to keep pace. The advent of generative AI in the arsenal of cyber attackers signals a troubling escalation in the severity of business email compromise and phishing threats. Monitoring Bolster’s journey from its early days, I am thoroughly impressed by their innovative application of AI to proactively identify and neutralize fraudulent activities by targeting the very infrastructure of these attacks,” said Todd Graham, Managing Partner at M12.
Since 2017, Bolster has used AI and machine learning to train models on over 100TB of structured data of URLs, domains, natural language text, and emails. Bolster created CheckPhish, one of the most popular phish and scam detection sites on the internet since 2018, with over 20% of the Fortune 500 registered as users. This site’s huge amount of data is used to augment Bolster’s AI and machine learning models.
“As a global platform serving tens of millions of people around the world, Bolster has proven to be invaluable in helping to uncover and prevent an array of phishing, scam, and impersonation attempts across multiple digital channels. We’ve been impressed by their innovative solutions at the intersection of generative AI and cybersecurity, resulting in swift identification and eradication of external online threats, and are looking forward to seeing how its platform capabilities will expand with the backing of M12 Ventures,” said Jeff Sen of WeTransfer.
Bolster’s platform advancements leverage generative AI’s application to cybersecurity. In the past year, Bolster has introduced eight cutting-edge LLM technology-based transformers, capable of detecting and eliminating phishing threats before they can even reach an email. Bolster’s engineers and researchers constantly update their deposition engine and orchestrator with the latest intent models for text and vision, making Bolster’s generative AI ethical and resilient against data bias.
“Bolster is committed to leading the industry in leveraging generative AI for real-time detection and response to phishing and impersonation attacks. This issue impacts nearly all businesses today,” said Bolster Co-founder and CTO Shashi Prakash. “This investment validates our technology and accelerates our platform development and go-to-market initiatives.”
With the new funding, Bolster plans to invest in GTM initiatives that strategically prioritize executive monitoring, business email compromise (BEC) attack detection and takedown, and threat-hunting automation. The sales organization will be structured around these key areas, supported by comprehensive training and marketing initiatives, to increase market penetration and heighten customer engagement.
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