Kalon Venture Partners Invest in Cyber-Security Email Protection Firm

South African venture capital firm Kalon Venture Partners announced its investment in cyber-security email protection and compliance business, Sendmarc.

Sendmarc was launched in 2018 by Sam Hutchinson, Keith Thompson and Sacha Matulovich. These key founding members were the pioneers in identifying a need for a safer and more secure email environment for small to large companies.

Sendmarc provides the setup, implementation and reporting functionality for a global email protection standard known as DMARC. This protocol is designed to give email domain owners the ability to protect their domains from unauthorised use, such as impersonation attacks or email spoofing.

The purpose and primary outcomes of implementing DMARC are to protect a domain from being used in business email compromise attacks, phishing emails, email scams and other invasive cyber threats. By accelerating the implementation of DMARC, Sendmarc enables organizations to protect not only themselves but their customers, suppliers and the whole world from impersonation attacks on the implementing organization’s domain.

Sendmarc is spearheaded by CEO Sam Hutchinson who has an exemplary track record in building and exiting tech businesses. He is also the founder of Everlytic, a successful marketing platform that focused on enterprise-level marketing in the cloud. Headquartered in Johannesburg, the company today provides businesses with digital marketing tools that enable them to track their communication, from email marketing and social sharing to analytics.

Everlytic was sold to Vox telecoms and is to date the largest South African email-marketing platform.

Butkow continued “at Kalon we firstly invest in people. Sam, Sacha and Keith gave us confidence that they were the right team for this opportunity. This is not their first rodeo and they bring significant experience in building and scaling tech businesses.”

“The need for a secure system that ensures ‘business as usual’ is more important than ever before and we are excited about Sendmarc joining our portfolio. Cloning of emails and malicious intent is now something a business can have control over, and in doing so we are indeed part of the solution towards winning the war on cyber threats”, he said.