Sublime raises Series B to… keep doing what we’ve been doing, but better

Déjà vu. It feels like just yesterday we announced our Series A.

Not exactly yesterday, but a few months ago. 7 months ago to be exact.

That’s fast. You’re probably thinking: “another round of funding already?”

We were surprised too. What we were even more surprised by is how much Sublime has been adopted and loved by the community over these past months, and that’s why we’re here today with this news:

We’ve raised $60M in a Series B financing led by IVP, with participation from Citi Ventures and existing investors Index Ventures, Decibel Partners, and Slow Ventures. We’re also extremely stoked, humbled, and honored to welcome CJ, former Wiz CRO, as President to lead go-to-market.

The news is also out in CNBC today, which is pretty cool. (Hi mom and Ian’s mom — yes, we have real jobs. This is proof!)

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A brief story

Sublime really began in 2019 with 2 Maryland boys — me and my co-founder and partner in crime Ian Thiel — naive enough to think we could drive change in an industry that hadn’t seen much in years. Relentless in trying to make the world a slightly better place.

As we laid out in our Series A post, we got it wrong at first. It took us a couple years to learn some hard lessons and fundamental truths about the approach that we had settled on as an industry: black box, one size fits all, with lack of transparency, visibility, or control ultimately leaves customers in the dark with their hands tied behind their backs.

In 2021, a lot of people thought we were crazy.

A detection engine backed by a programmable DSL, exposed transparently to customers? “That’ll never work. Nobody will want that.”

Allow customers to self-host in their Cloud? “That’s a terrible idea.”

Give it away for free to the Community? “Do you not like money?”

We started building anyway.

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Fast forward

Here we are in 2024 and people are running, trying, and buying Sublime faster than we can sell it. Where are they all coming from?

We have yet to send a single cold sales email or phone call, or run a single paid ad. Sublime spreads primarily through word of mouth, which means that people tell other people to use Sublime because they love it and it just works.

Sublime has set a new standard for what security solutions can and should be. The approach and execution are phenomenal.

Jonas Eichinger
‍Security Operations Lead, Benteler

This year was particularly special because Sublime helped preserve the integrity of our presidential election by protecting the Harris campaign from email originating threats. (We also reached out to the Trump campaign to help but couldn’t get in touch.)

Having spent my career in national security, I couldn’t be more proud of the impact Sublime has had on highly targeted organizations across our country and around the world.

Today, I’m more convinced than ever that the path we chose, despite resetting our clock back a couple years, is right. Not only for tackling email security, but the architecture of the future in a new world of AI-assisted threats.

The real-time detection engines of tomorrow must rapidly adapt to changes in the threat landscape, while working at massive scale and across tremendous environmental diversity. Detection efficacy gets stale otherwise. Not to mention the lack of transparency, visibility, and control that most practitioners at large enterprises need to do their jobs effectively.

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What now?

The problem is getting worse with AI-assisted attacks.

What we’re doing is working — people love Sublime.

So, we’re going to keep doing more of what we’ve been doing.

Putting our customers first, driving value and outcomes, and making the Internet a little bit safer.

Continuing to innovate and push the boundaries of what’s possible in email security.

Investing in threat research to further our collective knowledge as an industry. (We published some cool research on an attempted Xloader delivery via a Microsoft Sharepoint impersonation attack. You should check it out.)

Sublime feels like it was made for analysts, by analysts, with the data needed for executives.
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Jordyn Coyne
Senior Manager of Incident Response, Elastic

As a security nerd at heart, I think I could die happily now. I'm definitely getting this tattooed on my chest, or somewhere.

But really, there's so much work to do.

It’s Day 1.

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