How Google and Yahoo’s shift to stricter email standards proved a windfall for this Armenian startup

EasyDMARC, a B2B SaaS startup out of Armenia that aims to simplify email security and authentication, said it has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by New York-based Radian Capital.

DMARC is a technical standard that is designed to protect the senders and recipients of email from spam, spoofing and phishing. This “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance” remained a somewhat obscure, if important, standard until October 2023, when Google and Yahoo! said they would make it mandatory for bulk email senders from this year.

Since DMARC’s creation in 2012, many major email providers have committed to implementing the protocol for bulk email senders, but plenty of companies are yet to implement it in their systems. EasyDMARC has leveraged the momentum to amass more than 83,000 customers in over 130 countries since it was founded in 2018 by Gerasim Hovhannisyan and Avag Arakelyan.

It’s clear the enforcement of the standard has helped the startup in this fundraising.

Hovhannisyan told TechCrunch the funding round came together pretty easily after Google’s announcement: “We were getting inbound [interest] from investors. More than 40 VCs started talking to us, and this March, we got a lot of term sheets. We were most aligned with Radian on work and culture, and passed their due diligence. We will be using their networks to help us grow in the U.S. and globally,” added Hovhannisyan.

Admittedly, the startup does have competitors: Valimail (raised $84 million), ProofPoint, and Minecast (raised $90.2 million) also provide email security and authentication services. 

But, as Hovhannisyan said: “As the name implies, our solution is easy. What matters is customers saying it’s easy; they get peace of mind. They don’t need expert knowledge to implement our solution.” 

Hovhanisyan came up with the idea for the company in 2016 after looking into the aftermath of a severe email phishing attack on a multi-billion-dollar company. He looked into the latest email security technologies and though there were a variety of solutions, none packed the DMARC protocol into something relatively easy for businesses to use. So together with co-founder Arakelyan, in 2018, he launched the startup to tackle this problem.

More standards are on the way that will further benefit EasyDMARC.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of security standards designed to ensure that all companies that accept, process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment. From March next year, all fintech companies will have to use the PCI DSS standard — this also benefits EasyDMARC.

The funding round also highlights the growing momentum in the Armenian startup ecosystem, which has been attracting attention from global investors. With a population of around 3 million, Armenia is not a large market, so startups go international right away. It helps that the country has a long history of tech innovation and is one of the five top scientific research centers in the former USSR. Notable local companies include the unicorns Picsart and ServiceTitan.

Commenting on the funding round, Dana Sadovnic, principal at Radian Capital, said in a statement: “EasyDMARC is poised to capitalize on a massive and largely untapped market opportunity, driven by generational tailwinds from Google and Yahoo’s regulatory announcements and rising phishing attacks.”