Abnormal Security, Co-founded By Sanjay Jeyakumar, Valued At $5 Billion

Can Abnormal Security, cofounded by Evan Reiser and Sanjay Jeyakumar, grow into a major cybersecurity company

(Photo: Sanjay Jeyakumar, left, with Evan Reisser, cofounders Abnormal Security.)

August 8, 2024

The easy and cheap access to artificial intelligence (AI) tools enables even petty criminals to launch sophisticated phishing attacks seeking bank and other financial information, malware, cloud account takeovers, vendor frauds, and other frauds. Worse, interconnected digital cloud services gives them access to all accounts. Not surprisingly, there are frequent reports of breaches of email and other digital accounts causing financial and reputational damage.

Abnormal Security’s AI based platforms seek to protect users from cyber criminals. The San Francisco based startup’s machine learning models analyze thousands of signals from multiple sources to detect anomalous activity that seek to exploit known human behavior.

“Attackers continue to rely on the natural human tendency to trust digital communications and use social engineering tactics to target my employees…the arms race between malicious AI and defensive AI continues,” Rodney Masney, chief information officer of O-I Glass, said in a statement. O-I Glass, an Abnormal client, is a manufacturer of glass containers based in Ohio, with a market value of $1.8 billion.

Abnormal provides security for Microsoft and Google mail as well as multi-platform defense for more than a dozen cloud infrastructure and software applications including Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack and Amazon Web Services. More than 2,400 organizations use Abnormal to protect their employees, including Maersk, Xerox, Mattel, and several Fortune 500 companies. Over the past year, the company has expanded into Europe, Asia, and Australia. Recently, its annual recurring revenues totaled more than $200 million.

Today, Abnormal announced it raised $250 million in a funding round which valued it at $5.1 billion. Investors included Wellington Management as well as earlier investors Greylock Partners, Menlo Ventures, Insight Partners, and a CrowdStrike venture fund.

“We’ve earned the trust of our customers by providing the best product in human behavior security,” Evan Reiser, Chief Executive of Abnormal said in a statement.

In 2018, Reiser cofounded Abnormal with Sanjay Jeyakumar. The startup was incubated at the office of Greylock Partners, a venture fund in Menlo Park, California, which reportedly manages $3.5 billion in assets. Jeyakumar is Abnormal’s chief technical officer and head of research and development.

Earlier, Reiser and Jeyakumar worked at Twitter and TellApart. At Twitter, from 2015-2018. Reiser led product management and machine learning teams for the advertising business. Jeyakumar was the systems architect, responsible for the distributed data processing and machine learning systems that powered Twitter’s business.

From 2009-2015, Jeyakumar was the founding engineer and architect of TellApart, which helped large retailers personalize their marketing to customers by analyzing their purchases, payments, address, and other data. In 2013, TellApart bought Adstack, which applied data science to advertising technology, including real-time personalized emails to customers of e-commerce companies. Reiser, who was the CEO of Adstack, stayed on as the first product manager at TellApart. In 2015, Twtiter bought TellApart for more than $500 million.

In 2008, Reiser cofounded Bloomspot, which used online advertising to drive offline sales. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, it was acquired by JPMorgan Chase in 2010. During 2007-2008, he founded and ran GamerNook, a New York area based online social media platform for gamers. It apparently failed because it was a “bad business model,” as Reiser describes it on his LinkedIn profile.

During 2006-2007, Reiser was a software engineer at S&P Capital IQ, in the New York area. In 2003, he started his career at Eastman Kodak, Harrow, United Kingdom, doing research and development in machine learning for intelligence applications. He holds a BS in Computer Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

(Photo: Sanjay Jeyakumar)

Jeyakumar was a senior software engineer at Google, from 2005 to 2009, where he was on the engineering team working on next-generation Google Search technology and the launch of Android. He also worked at Oracle, 2003-2005, and was an intern at PARC, a Xerox company, in 2002.

Jeyakumar holds an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, 2003-2007, and a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, 1999-2003.  

Recently, with plans of launching a public offering of its stock, Abnormal has hired several senior managers, including Smita Sanadhya as Chief Financial Officer. She was earlier a senior vice president of finance at Okta, a San Francisco based digital identity provider with a market value of $14 billion.

In recent years, two startup rivals of Abnormal have been acquired, according to CNBC: Avanan by Check Point Software in August 2021 for approximately $280 million, and Area 1 Security by Cloudflare in February 2022 for around $162 million.

Given the huge potential size, the cybersecurity market is crowded with competitors, including major companies like Cloudflare, Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks, and CrowdStrike as well as subsidiaries of giants like Microsoft.

But Reiser and Jeyakumar are not deterred by the numerous, larger competitors. In a blog post on Abnormal’s website, Reiser writes, “Abnormal is just getting started in our AI transformation of cybersecurity… our ambitions are audacious…We envision Abnormal not just as a leader in email security but as the leader in AI-powered cybersecurity and a cornerstone security platform for every organization.”