Kaseya Buys Inky to Expand Email Threat Detection for MSPs

Kaseya purchased an email security provider led by the former COO of ITA Software to achieve broader data access and integration with a larger platform.

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The Miami-based IT and security management provider said its acquisition of Washington D.C.-area Inky offers a product-market fit with MSPs because of the offering’s ease of use and reduced admin burden, said Inky founder and CEO Dave Baggett. He said email security cannot rely solely on in-message analysis and requires contextual data that platforms such as Kaseya can provide.

“There’s just a lot of complexity MSPs are facing now and that they’re going to have to deal with, and a holistic solution like Kaseya is much more likely to be able to solve the information overload problem for MSPs,” Baggett told Information Security Media Group. “We realized that being an email security company in isolation limits your data that you could use to make decisions.”

Inky, founded in 2008, employs 40 people and has raised nearly $32 million, having most recently closed a $20 million Series B funding round in June 2020 led by Insight Partners, which has controlled Kaseya since June 2013. Inky has been led since its inception by Baggett, who co-founded and served as COO of airfare pricing system provider ITA Software, which was acquired by Google in 2011 (see: MSP Efficiency Set to Surge With SaaS Alerts Joining Kaseya).

Why Inky Now Needs Detection Signals Outside of Email

For a decade, Baggett said Inky focused primarily on analyzing email headers, body and attachments to make determinations about whether a message was malicious or not. But achieving better detection outcomes would require signals from outside of email such as login data, behavioral anomalies and network telemetry. Baggett said integrating with Kaseya gives Inky access to this breadth of data.

“We’ve spent 10 years focusing on the content of the mail when we’re trying to evaluate whether a mail is good or bad,” Baggett said. “It’s pretty clear that to continue to do as well and improve detection, we need signals from things outside of email.”

Understanding where a user logged in from can help determine the legitimacy of an email they appear to send, Baggett said. If a user logs in from San Francisco, but an email supposedly from them originates in Latvia moments later, that’s a red flag. That kind of cross-validation is only possible with access to broader platform data, Baggett said.

“I already have multiple Kaseya people saying, ‘Hey, we would like to get this data from you. Can we work on that with you?'” Baggett said. “So, there’s going to be a lot of synergy across different components and the owners of those components under this new API-first rubric.”

A team of two people working the MSP channel for Inky generated surprising traction, growing to $1 million in annual recurring revenue almost on their own, which Baggett said prompted the company to reevaluate its market focus. MSPs found greater value in Inky’s ease of use, low deployment friction and intuitive interface than large enterprises, which had teams of analysts and more tolerance for complexity.

“We started out really with an enterprise-focused product,” Baggett said. “Ten years ago, we were mostly trying to sell to enterprises, and we had literally two people in the company who did all of the MSP selling and what we found was they had grown that to like a million ARR by themselves. We made a decision. It felt like we had a better fit actually with MSPs for a variety of reasons.”

How Inky Will Benefit From Kaseya’s New API-First Strategy

Baggett sees Kaseya’s new API-first strategy as a catalyst for seamless data-sharing across tools. Inky previously had limited API engagement and stands to benefit significantly from this design shift both by ingesting external data to improve its detection and by contributing Inky data to other Kaseya tools, Baggett said.

“There’s lots of data that we would like to get from the rest of the Kaseya platform to improve email detection and vice versa,” Baggett said. “I think this is really smart because this is essentially what Jeff Bezos mandated at Amazon, and it’s what led to AWS essentially.”

Phishing attacks are virtually undetectable to traditional email protection systems because they come from a legitimate domain, are DKIM-signed and contain no overtly suspicious content. Baggett called on CISOs to rethink how they approach email security and understand that the arms race has escalated far beyond spam filtering.

“If you think these guys are script kiddies who are making these malicious mails, think again,” Baggett said. “I just gave an example where the attacker had to do like seven different, very sophisticated steps carefully to create the phish they did. And the phish they created is essentially impossible to detect on the receiving side unless you have a language understanding.”

Even with a superior product, Inky’s growth was limited by low brand awareness since many MSPs simply didn’t know the company existed. Joining Kaseya provides Inky with access to a massive built-in distribution network, enabling the product to be introduced to thousands of potential customers who wouldn’t have encountered it. He expects rapid adoption across mailboxes and ARR as a result.

“Given the reach Kaseya has, we should see a vast amount of adoption of our solution fairly rapidly,” Baggett said. “You can have the greatest product in the world, but if no one knows you exist, you’re just going to be limited. I think adding the massive reach that Kaseya has is just like a no-brainer. And I’m totally convinced that once they experience it, they’re going to be like, ‘Oh man, I want this.'”