Cloudmark Raises $4.5 Million from Ignition Partners to Extend its already Significant Lead in the Anti-Spam Space
Key leaders of the Internet and email revolution see a winner in Cloudmark's superior technology and business approach
SAN FRANCISCO — July 21, 2003 — Cloudmark™, the company that has grown the world's largest and fastest growing SpamFighting community to over half a million users and delivered its solutions to thousands of businesses around the world, today announced that Ignition Partners is backing its unique approach with $4.5 million in financing. Ignition Partners, founded by former Microsoft® executives and a team of industry leaders who brought you much of the software used by consumers and enterprises today including Microsoft Windows®, Internet Explorer®, Exchange® and Office® chose Cloudmark because of its superior technology and business approach. Having won the recent PC Magazine spam filtering review and the Best of Comdex finalist award for its enterprise product Authority™, Cloudmark is the only company that has defined a unique technology and business model which solves the ever-growing spam problem in a highly cost-effective way. A key differentiator is that Cloudmark products improve as more people use them, a phenomenon that drives business and sales costs down.
"We have been looking for some time for a company that had the technology to stop spam and the business model to make money doing so," says Cameron Myhrvold, general partner and a founder of Ignition Partners. "We set the bar high asking Cloudmark to prove themselves and they greatly exceeded our expectations."
Ignition sees in Cloudmark a business model that stands above the competition on three fronts:
- A business where the more people use the product, the better it gets. Cloudmark is the only anti-spam company with this phenomenon where the more people who use SpamNet™, the more effective it becomes.
- A community of SpamFighters™ that replace the costs normally associated with identifying and eliminating spam. Only Cloudmark has this highly efficient, real-time and automated process that stops spam the instant it appears. This blows away the low-tech model of hiring thousands of people to sit in an operations center and fight each spam message by hand.
- A consumer product with outstanding word of mouth that drives enterprise sales.
"We had been looking for an approach to fighting spam with the kind of differentiated product and business model that drove Microsoft's success," says Brad Silverberg, managing partner and a founder of Ignition, formerly a Microsoft executive best known as an industry pioneer who built the Windows franchise and led Microsoft's Internet turnaround. "In a long list of companies tackling the spam problem, we found the one that not only has a unique business model and technology, but that has executed against the opportunity."
"We chose Ignition because they bring experience in both consumer and enterprise software that is unmatched," says Karl Jacob, CEO for Cloudmark. "The Ignition team created and marketed more of the software that's running on your desktop than anyone else and we're excited to work with them to take Cloudmark to the next level."
Ignition's Myhrvold and Martin Tobias join Cloudmark's Board of Directors in conjunction with the financing. Myhrvold spent 13-years with Microsoft where he was most recently Vice President of Microsoft's Internet Customer Unit and previously created and ran the Developer Relations Group to evangelize Windows and initiated "platform marketing." Tobias, an Ignition venture partner spent more than 15 years in operating roles in technology companies, including four years as CEO at Loudeye Technologies, a company he founded and six years with Microsoft.
The two join Jacob, a three-time successful entrepreneur who led his previous company to $10 million in transactions per quarter putting it on the path to profitability. Jacob also worked with many of the Ignition partners during his time at Microsoft following the acquisition of Dimension X, a company he founded. In addition to Myhrvold, Tobias and Jacob, the board includes Michael Tanne, a serial entrepreneur who previously founded or held leadership positions at Verity, AdForce and XDegrees and Alexander Edelstein, manager of Gemstone-Edelstein Capital who previously held leadership positions at Inktomi, Netscape and Microsoft.
Cloudmark's consumer product SpamNet saves you time by protecting you from spam. SpamNet is the first and largest SpamFighting community in the world with more than half a million users since its launch just one-year ago June. To try SpamNet FREE for 30-days, visit www.cloudmark.com/spamnet . SpamNet for Microsoft Outlook Express® is coming this summer. Cloudmark's award-winning enterprise product, Authority, stops spam at the gateway using innovative spamDNA™ technology to predict and stop spam before it costs companies millions of dollars in lost productivity. Authority 1.0 is available on Windows, Linux and Solaris with Authority 2.0 due out this summer. To learn more about Authority, visit www.cloudmark.com/products/authority.
About Ignition Partners
Ignition Partners, (www.ignitionpartners.com), headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., is a premier venture capital firm focused on early stage computing, network infrastructure and telecommunications startups in the Western United States. Ignition brings together an unparalleled combination of domain focus, technical expertise and operational experience. Ignition's partners are proven business leaders with more than 160 years of combined experience, who have built some of the world's most successful businesses of the last two decades, including Microsoft Windows, McCaw Cellular Communications, AT&T Wireless and Microsoft's enterprise business. The VC's founders are also credited with leading Microsoft's Internet turnaround.
Microsoft, Windows, Internet Explorer, Exchange, Office, Outlook and Outlook Express are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp.
All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
About Cloudmark
Cloudmark protects 2 billion global subscribers daily from an explosion in messaging abuses across more operator networks than anyone else. Only Cloudmark defends the world’s largest Mobile, Fixed and Social Media Providers, including AT&T, Comcast, MySpace, NTT, Swisscom and Time Warner Cable, with scalable and accurate protection against the widest range of existing and emerging messaging threats.