Sublime Security, the first open email security platform that allows anyone to write, run, and share rules to detect and block email-based threats like phishing attacks, has gone public and raised $9.8 million in funding. The platform has been in private beta testing for more than a year and is already in use at dozens of organizations, including Fortune 500s, Global 2000s, and FTSE 250s, with a waiting list of 2,500 organizations.
Decibel led Sublime’s funding round, which included Slow Ventures and others. Many notable cybersecurity professionals and founders invested as angels, including Sounil Yu, creator of the Cyber Defense Matrix and DIE Triad, Martin Roesch, creator of Snort and Sourcefire, Jerry Perullo, Lookout founder Kevin Patrick Mahaffey, former Zscaler CISO Michael Sutton, Demisto founders Rishi Bhargava and Slavik Markovich, and Phantom Cyber and Pangea founder Oliver Friedrichs.
Joshua Kamdjou, a former Department of Defense offensive security professional, founded the company with co-founder and former Optimizely and Alto growth head Ian Thiel. Kamdjou joined the DoD while still in high school and worked on and led numerous offensive security initiatives for more than eight years.
Sublime’s founder and CEO Joshua Kamdjou expressed the need for greater collaboration and control in securing organizations from email-based threats. He explained that while security professionals have effective tools for other areas of security, email security has been lacking. Sublime aims to change that by making it easy for anyone to secure their organization from email-based threats through collaboration and contributions from everyone.
According to the FBI, phishing emails are the most common cybercrime attack method, with the financial fallout increasing from $1.8 billion in 2020 to $2.4 billion in 2021. According to Verizon’s 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report, email remains the most common delivery method for malicious payloads such as ransomware.
Kamdjou wanted to create a product that could stop someone like him, and he realized the key was empowering email security professionals everywhere, from large security teams at well-resourced enterprises to independent researchers and solo defenders, to collaborate and have more control.
Sublime’s innovative platform enables a fully transparent, self-serve solution that leverages the entire community’s wisdom to tackle email threats proactively. According to Dan Nguyen-Huu, a partner at Decibel, this new approach turns the traditional passive approach of email security on its head and allows security leads to collaborate across organizations for mutual defense.
