Vade Secure, an email security provider, has a new $79.2 million financing agreement with General Catalyst to build a go-to-market strategy focused on MSPs in North America.

The company said it also will invest “heavily” in advancing its platform’s core machine learning-based threat detection capabilities, as well as its native email security solution for Office 365. The investment builds on Vade Secure’s international expansion during the last four years, with major deals across North America, Europe and Japan.

Georges Lotigier, Vade Secure‘s CEO, tells us the funding will benefit current and future partners.

Vade Secure’s George Litigier

“[The MSP-focused strategy] means putting the right systems and processes in place to efficiently onboard and enable partners, while providing them with the resources (marketing, sales, technical, support [and so on]) they need to be successful,” he said. “And it also means investing aggressively in innovation to maintain our technological leadership in AI-based threat detection, so that MSPs can offer their clients best-in-class email security solutions.”

Vade Secure’s growth has come primarily through major deals in the ISP and OEM markets, including Comcast, Cisco, BT, Softbank and others, as well as through its existing channel of more than 500 partners globally, which already accounts for 40% of the company’s revenue, Lotigier said.

“The next phase of the company’s growth and expansion will come from servicing the SMB market segment through MSPs,” he said. “Companies of all sizes are being targeted with email attacks; yet, because legacy email security products are expensive and require specialized skills, their reach has been limited to the enterprise. As the trusted adviser to SMBs, MSPs bring the necessary cybersecurity expertise and are perfectly positioned to close this cybersecurity gap and profitably grow their businesses in the process.”

Email continues to be the No. 1 cyberattack vector, with a proliferation of targeted phishing, spear phishing, malware and ransomware attacks globally, Lotigier said. In addition, there’s an ongoing “tidal shift” from on-premises to cloud-based email platforms, with Office 365 commanding 54% share of the overall email applications market, he said.

“Vade Secure and our partners are perfectly positioned to capture market share and accelerate growth thanks to these two factors,” he said. “Our native email security solution, Vade Secure for Office 365, offers all the power and performance of our core threat detection engine, while being easy to deploy, easy to manage (simple configuration means less man hours for MSPs), and easy to use (no external quarantine for end users). This makes it an unbeatable combination for both MSPs and SMBs.”

As part of the financing agreement, General Catalyst investors Paul Sagan, former CEO of Akamai Technologies, and Matthew Brennan will join Vade Secure’s board. Austin McChord, founder and former CEO of Datto and General Catalyst investor, also will join the board.

“As an entrepreneur who built Datto from the ground up into a multibillion-dollar business, I lived and breathed MSPs,” McChord said. “From the moment I first saw Vade Secure, I realized the company’s immense potential to be an essential piece of solving cybersecurity for MSPs. The instantly deployable O365 protection is the perfect mix of enterprise-grade security and total automation that today’s MSPs need.”