Ayala Corporation's Active Fund, the country's largest venture capital fund, joined a team of investors to secure $26 million in Series B venture capital financing for SlashNext, the leader in SaaS-based spear-phishing and human hacking defense across digital channels and apps.
The round brings SlashNext's total funding to $43 million.
The recent fund-raising will accelerate the company's mission to protect the world's 4B Internet users from all forms of phishing - the number one multi-billion-dollar cybersecurity threat to organizations and consumers.
Ninety-one percent of all successful cyber breaches start with spear-phishing - including ransomware, data theft, and over $30B of financial fraud.
About 3-4 percent of malware detected is ransomware, translating to hundreds of thousands of attacks.
Since January this year, attacks have increased at least 50 percent and continue to rise. Ransomware can grow to 300 percent, translating to $20 billion in damages.
In Southeast Asia, cybercrimes are increasing on Tor darknet, including fake passports, fake currencies, stolen credit card and personal identification information, drugs, and cybercrime toolkits.
Government entities in the Philippines and Myanmar experienced cyberespionage attacks since at least October 2020 through spear-phishing emails containing a malicious Word document.
"When cybercriminals launch successful spear-phishing attacks, the results are massively disruptive to people, organizations, and the economy," warned SlashNext CEO Patrick Harr.
"This is the number one cyber challenge that organizations and individuals globally face, and bad actors are only increasing their attacks and becoming more sophisticated at taking advantage of the most vulnerable part of organizations - its people."
"Our mission is to protect our customers from these threats, and this new funding will enable us to scale and innovate faster so that we can help customers outpace the risk," he maintained.
With the new investment, SlashNext will scale its customer acquisition and operations domestically and internationally. It will also drive key distribution partnerships with MSSP, embedded OEMs, and carriers, including its new strategic investors, Telia Telecom in Europe and Globe Telecom in APAC, which represents over 40M mobile subscribers.
SlashNext also expects to advance its lead in Rtificial Intelligence (AI) cloud and on-device multi-channel and multi-language detection of all forms of targeted phishing – SMiShing, Vishing, BEC, bank fraud, scams, rogue browsers, credential stealing, ransomware, social engineering, and other malicious digital user attacks – launched from legitimate hosted sites or received from trusted supply chain vendors.
“Unlike in the past, where cybersecurity breaches mainly focused on email through business devices, attacks now occur on different applications installed on endpoint devices like mobile phones and tablets, which can be personal and less protected,” noted Kickstart Ventures President Minette Navarrete.
“The Active Fund investment in SlashNext recognises the evolving nature of communication for work and life - data-driven and digital, collaborative, and accessible anywhere, any time, and on any device. We’re keen to support SlashNext’s mission in tackling this global issue.”