EasyDMARC, an Armenian B2B SaaS startup that aims to simplify email security and authentication, announced that it has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by New York-based Radian Capital.
DMARC is a technology standard designed to protect email senders and recipients from spam, spoofing, and phishing. This “domain-based message authentication, reporting, and compliance” remained a somewhat vague but important standard until October 2023, when Google and Yahoo! announced that they would make it mandatory for bulk email senders starting this year.
Since DMARC was created in 2012, many major email providers have committed to implementing the protocol for bulk email senders, but many have yet to implement it in their systems. Founded in 2018 by Gerasim Hovhannisyan and Avag Arakelyan, EasyDMARC has gained momentum, amassing over 83,000 customers in over 130 countries.
It is clear that enforcing standards has helped startups raise funding.
Hovhanishan told TechCrunch that the funding round came together fairly easily after Google’s announcement. “We had a lot of interest from investors. We had over 40 VCs start talking to us, and we had a lot of term sheets in March of this year. We were the ones who really resonated with Radian, their work and culture, and they did their due diligence. We’re going to leverage their network to help them grow in the US and globally,” Hovhanishan added.
Of course, the startup has competitors: Valimail ($84 million raised), ProofPoint, and Minecast ($90.2 million raised) also offer email security and authentication services.
But as Hovanishan says, “As the name suggests, our solution is easy. The important thing is that our customers say it’s easy. They get peace of mind. They don’t need any expertise to implement our solution.”
Hovhanishan came up with the idea for the company after investigating the aftermath of a serious email phishing attack on a multi-billion dollar company in 2016. He looked into the latest email security technologies and found that while there were a variety of solutions, none of them condensed the DMARC protocol into something relatively easy for businesses to use. So he and co-founder Arakelian started a startup in 2018 to solve this problem.
There are upcoming standards that will provide even more benefits to EasyDMARC.
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of security standards designed to ensure that any company that accepts, processes, stores, or transmits credit card information maintains a secure environment. Starting in March next year, all fintech companies must use the PCI DSS standard. This also benefits EasyDMARC.
The funding round also highlights the growing momentum of the Armenian startup ecosystem, which is attracting attention from global investors. With a population of about 3 million, Armenia is not a large market, so startups are readily international. It also helps that the country has a long history of technological innovation and is one of the top five scientific research centers in the former Soviet Union. Notable local companies include unicorns Picsart and ServiceTitan.
Dana Sadovnic, President of Radian Capital, commented on the funding round: “EasyDMARC is poised to capitalize on a massive and largely untapped market opportunity driven by generational momentum from regulatory announcements from Google and Yahoo and increased phishing attacks.”
