Following Red Sift OnDMARC being featured in 18 reports in G2’s Spring 2025 Report, CEO Rahul Powar shares his thoughts on the innovation behind the product—and what’s driving its continued momentum in the fight against phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC).
- What inspired you to start Red Sift, and how did you identify the need for a solution like OnDMARC in the cybersecurity space?
When I founded Red Sift, my goal was to make proactive cybersecurity accessible for organizations of any size. Email was high on our list of problems to solve because more than 90% of all cyberattacks start with email. The inspiration to focus at the protocol level came from seeing firsthand how powerful but complex email security protocols, like DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance), were often underutilized due to their technical barriers.
I realized there was an opportunity to automate this complexity, empowering even non-specialists to protect their organizations. OnDMARC emerged directly from this need—to make DMARC implementation straightforward, enabling businesses to secure their domains rapidly, without deep specialist expertise.
- Cybersecurity is a crowded market—what challenges did you face in getting OnDMARC off the ground, and how did you differentiate it from other solutions?
As we prepared to launch OnDMARC, there was a clear need to address significant market inertia and skepticism. Organizations often delayed DMARC adoption because it required specialized knowledge and significant manual work. Many did not appreciate the value of deploying this protocol layer in addition to their existing email security infrastructure, which remains a challenge today.
Over the years, we’ve seen progress as organizations have become more educated and increasingly recognize the value of these technical controls. Large providers such as Google and Yahoo have made technical controls such as DMARC a requirement for emailing their users, leading to 2.3 million more domains implementing basic DMARC reporting in 2024. I hope to see Microsoft follow suit this year.
Through this transition, our core differentiation became automating this complexity—our “computers, not consultants” approach. By integrating OnDMARC into the broader Red Sift platform, we automated continuous asset discovery, management of all the relevant protocols on a single control pane, and threat identification—making sophisticated security protocols manageable for everyone.
Driving market-leading solutions
- Red Sift has grown significantly, offering a suite of cybersecurity solutions beyond OnDMARC. How do you balance innovation with ensuring your products remain best-in-class?
Innovation and excellence are complementary for us. We built Red Sift Pulse as a unified platform that supports rapid innovation across multiple cybersecurity products, including certificate monitoring and brand impression, without compromising reliability. This approach lets us integrate new standards, like MTA-STS, seamlessly alongside a unified intelligence platform that allows ingestion of large and unwieldy data sets like spam trap data to augment standard DMARC reports. It ensures we can swiftly innovate while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability, keeping our solutions both cutting-edge and dependable for our customers.
We are also committed to world-class customer service. Over the years we have grown to 100+ employees across 15 countries, meaning our team is on hand to support our customer needs regardless of timezone.
- What role has customer feedback played in shaping Red Sift’s products, and can you share an example where user insights directly influenced your product roadmap?
Customer feedback is crucial to Red Sift. Our Customer Success team continuously interacts with our product team, ensuring the voice of our customers remains central to our decisions. A great example is our Investigate feature, which became a highly valued part of our workflow. We developed Investigate directly from observing our customers’ challenges in debugging complex email authentication issues. This includes reducing the up to 2-day wait for DMARC reports to validate their changes to near instant results through Investigate. This capability significantly streamlined their troubleshooting processes, demonstrating our commitment to directly addressing customer needs.
- As AI-driven threats continue to evolve, how is Red Sift leveraging AI and automation to stay ahead of cybercriminals?
AI is central to our strategy for combating sophisticated threats. In late 2024, we launched Red Sift Radar, our skilled up LLM security assistant. Radar significantly accelerates misconfiguration detection and remediation—reducing investigation time from hours to minutes by automating data collection and analysis. Our investment in AI is strategic: we continuously expand Radar’s capabilities by continuing to integrate it with more data sources and our extensive APIs, making it more capable over time.
Achieving success in the G2 Spring Report
- Being featured in 18 different reports as part of G2’s Spring Report launch is a huge achievement. What do you think has contributed to this level of industry recognition, and what does it mean for Red Sift?
I’m pleased to see such an extensive feature from G2, which recognizes us as a Leader in the DMARC category for the eighth consecutive quarter—a reflection of our relentless focus on delivering tangible outcomes for our customers. Users consistently appreciate our approachable design, automated capabilities, and immediate business value. Being recognized by G2 validates our customer-centric strategy and underscores that users find significant ROI in our products. It also signals to the broader market that we’re delivering meaningful innovation and genuine advancement in cybersecurity. I’m really proud of our whole team for consistently driving results.
The future and beyond at Red Sift
- With cybersecurity becoming an increasing priority for organizations of all sizes, where do you see the biggest opportunities for Red Sift in the next five years?
I see tremendous opportunity in expanding the adoption of email authentication globally, as a vast majority of domains remain unprotected. In addition, broader domain and brand protection represent major growth areas. Organizations increasingly seek integrated solutions rather than fragmented tools, so our platform approach—automating asset discovery, email protection, and domain security—positions us uniquely well. There’s also growing momentum around new standards, and our early investments in AI and automation place us ahead of competitors.
- What’s next for Red Sift? Are there any upcoming innovations, partnerships, or expansions we should be looking out for?
We’re committed to offering OnDMARC as a market-leading application to a global client base, while expanding our Red Sift Pulse Platform. This will enable a comprehensive cybersecurity package for our customers to use in their defense against the many advanced threats we are now observing.
We’ll also continue to enhance Radar with even more advanced AI-driven capabilities and integrate agentic workflows in our traditional SaaS products. Finally, strategic partnerships remain central to our growth strategy, including deeper integrations like our existing partnership with Cisco and our newly announced collaboration with Mailgun. Geographically, expect continued expansion in North America, Europe, and APAC as the challenges we solve for are truly global in nature.
