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Valimail at $30M ARR

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Valimail Denver, Colorado

Customer.io is a marketing automation and customer data platform.

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Jan-Erik Asplund

Published Nov 13th, 2024

TL;DR: Sacra estimates that Valimail will hit $30M annualized recurring revenue (ARR) in 2024, up 43% YoY, re-accelerating as Google, Yahoo and Apple begin to enforce DMARC authentication across all email senders. Indexed on the rising trend of business email phishing both incoming mail (security) and outgoing mail (deliverability), Valimail has carved out a market in the shadow of giants like Proofpoint and Mimecast. For more, check out our full Valimail report and dataset.

Key points via Sacra AI:

The email authentication protocol DMARC gained attention in 2015 when Gmail, Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail started using it to prevent their domains from being spoofed—creating the opportunity for Valimail (2015) to launch a DMARC-as-a-service tool for any company regardless of IT capacity. Growing to 5,000 accounts by 2020 and to 65,000 by 2024 with free DMARC diagnostic tools, Valimail helped educate companies on their phishing risk and why emails might be going to spam, with low CAC acquisition as an entry point into completing the complex and technical process of setting up DMARC (only ~50% of the top 1,000 websites using it in 2016).
In 2023, Google, Yahoo and Apple announced they would begin requiring anyone sending email to their users to have DMARC enabled—or end up in spam—accelerating demand for Vailmail to 43% YoY, with Sacra estimating that Valimail will hit $30M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by the end of 2024, with 65,000 customers for average revenue per customer (ARPC) of about $460. Compare to enterprise-centric email security all-in-ones like Proofpoint at $1.2B in revenue before their 2021 take-private by Thoma Bravo for $12.3B, and Mimecast at $970M in revenue in 2023 (up 13% YoY) before their 2022 acquisition by Permira for $5.8B, both with ARPC in the $10,000-$20,000 range.
As phishing continues to rise ($3B stolen in 2023, up 9% YoY), Valimail serves as a solution both as a deliverability tool for marketers sending outgoing mail (as a way to keep newsletters out of spam) and as a cybersecurity tool for incoming mail (preventing “CEO fraud” where attackers spoof your corporate domain). While email security platforms like Proofpoint bundle DMARC into their all-in-ones, Valimail has carved out a niche as a best-of-breed point solution, with 40% of Valimail customers paying for Proofpoint but still opting to use Valimail for DMARC.