Well 2021 was certainly a year to remember! Here’s just some of the things we’ve achieved in the last 12 months….

Tessian in numbers

• Scanned nearly 5 billion emails 
• Identified over half a million malicious emails
• Stopped close to 30,000 account takeover attempts
• Prevented over 100,000 data breaches due to a misdirected email
• We donated $13,220 donated to charities chosen by our customers during the winter holidays
• Promoted 39 people internally
• Hired 155 new employees with the highest proportion going to engineering and sales (we’re still hiring!) 
• Expanded our senior team to include roles such as CISO, Head of Threat Intelligence, Trust & Compliance Lead, Chief Product Officer, and Chief Strategy Officer
• Announced five new partner integrations including Okta, KnowBe4 and Sumo Logic.
• Secured 995 pieces of news coverage in both mainstream and trade media
• Welcomed nearly 6,000 attendees to our three virtual Human Layer Security Summits
• Hosted and sponsored 104 virtual and physical events globally

January

We kicked off January with our How to Hack a Human research report, and followed with our new mission video. On the product side, Tessian Defender began protecting against External Account Takeover.

February 

Tessian Guardian continued to evolve as February saw us launch our ‘Misattached Files’ feature, which uses machine learning to automatically detect and prevent people accidentally sharing the wrong files via email. Which, according to our research 48% of employees have done….

March

To celebrate International Women’s March Day, we launched our second installment of the Opportunity in Cybersecurity report, highlighting how nearly half of women working in cybersecurity (49%) say that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their career in a positive way. On the people side we welcomed Matt Smith as Chief Strategy Officer 

And Tessian Guardian continued to add new features with even more customization settings to fine tune it to your organization’s specific requirements. Finally, we launched our springtime Human Layer Security Summit. 

April

April saw the launch of our Diversity and Inclusion strategy, with our long term aim of growing and expanding the entry-level talent pool by creating junior jobs for people entering the tech industry, whether that’s in Sales or Engineering. 

On the product side, we also launched our Human Layer Risk Hub. 

May

We hit the jackpot in May when, after much hard work, we raised $74m raised in Series C plus extension funding. To announce the move we took over the famous billboard at Time Square. We also welcomed Sumo Logic CEO Ramin Sayar to Tessian’s Board of Directors.

And knowing how important rest and time away from work is to our staff, we launched Refressian Summer, giving every employee Friday afternoon off during July and August. 

June

June saw no signs of slowing down as we hosted our summer Human Layer Security Summit, added Human Layer Security Intelligence to our platform to help give you more visibility and insight into your human layer risks.

And, as the world came out of various lockdown programs, we launched our Back to Work Report. 

July

A highlight of July was our Summer social event, where staff could let their hair down and party (see below). We also (re)opened new & existing offices in London UK, Boston MA, and Austin TX. 

We were named Representative Vendor in the 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Data Loss Prevention. And we were recognized as one of the top three medium-sized companies in the UK’s Best Workplaces™ for Women.

August

August saw us set up shop at BlackHat USA 2021, and Hire Josh Yavor as our Chief Information Security Officer. 

September

After a relaxing summer, it was ‘back to school’ in September, when we launched our Spear Phishing Threat Landscape 2021 report. Over a 12-month period, Tessian detected nearly two million malicious emails that slipped past legacy phishing solutions. 

We also hired our 200th Tessian, and were voted Best Place to Work in Tech UK. We also held our first internal TES Talk – where once a month anyone in the company can give a short talk about a passion project, subject or something they’ve worked on. 

October

As the Fall rolled around October saw us launch Architect; a powerful policy engine for real-time email data loss prevention. Gartner recognized Tessian as a Representative Vendor in the 2021 Market Guide for Email Security.  And we were voted Rover’s best dog-friendly companies 2021 🐾. We announced our integration with integrations with Okta to help organizations protect against the biggest threats to enterprise security – people’s identities and behaviors.


The end of October also saw Central London reverberate to ghostly screams and wails as we hosted our Halloween karaoke social night… 

November

The penultimate month of the year saw our final HLS Summit of 2021. We also recognized how hard and stressful being a CISO can be in our CISO Lost Hours report. 

More people joined us including Allen Lieberrman joins as Chief Product Officer. A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Tessian shows that Security and Risk leaders feel little control over risks posed by employees, which you can read here. And the silverware kept coming as Fast Company named us one of best innovators in AI and Data, and Deloitte recognized our epic growth in their Fast 50 for 2021 list. The product team were kept busy with our integrations with Sumo Logic.

December

After an exciting year, it was once again time for a party, with those based in London meeting up in person for drinks and games, while others attended our online virtual event. Another month, another integration as we paired up with our good friends at KnowBe4 

We reached another milestone when our podcast, RE: The Human Layer, reached 5000 downloads. And we launched humanlayersecurity.com, our new online magazine for security leaders.

Finally, our marketing team met up in person in Austin, TX to plan out how we’re going to top what was a challenging but epic year for Tessian!

So, as we come to the end of 2021, we’d just like to say thank you to those of you who’ve been on this amazing journey with us, and as Frank Sintra once sang, the best is yet to come. See you in 2022… Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!