MX Logic Inc.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Tech Startup of the Month - Company Profile

Where: Englewood www.mxlogic.com Founded: April 2002

INITIAL LIGHTBULB

MX Logic co-founders John Street and Scott Chasin met while working in the same capacities at Colorado Springs-based e-mail services provider USA.NET Inc. through the 1990s. The duo saw spam wars as a critical area for that company, but the rest of the management team disagreed. "In the fall of 2001, the go-to-market strategy of USA.NET wasn't getting any traction." explained Street. "Scott and I made several attempts with the management team to try and get them to move into a security-oriented product offering, and they were going to stay the course of doing full e-mail outsourcing. Basically we said, 'If you're not going to do it, we're going to split off and do it ourselves.'" Street and Chasin, now MX Logic's CEO and CTO respectively, did just that. The company now has more than 100 employees and nearly 5,000 customers.

IN A NUTSHELL.

Backed by a 24/7 "Threat Center" and customer-service department at its DTC headquarters, MX Logic processes about 3 billion of its customers' messages every month, targeting spam, viruses and other unwanted e-mail. Customers include both Internet service providers--who in turn offer spam- and virus-blocking to their customer base--and enterprises of all sizes.

"Businesses can subscribe to MX Logic to identify and remove all of their bad e-mail traffic--spam, worms, phishing attacks," said Chasin. "We do so within the network layer, so there's no additional hardware and software that's required, and we have 'instant-on' capability, so that means immediate relief." For enterprises, pricing begins at $1 per user per month.

MX Logic's proprietary filtering technology includes more than 20 layers of defense, including such barriers as keyword and attachment filtering, heuristics, and Bayesian algorithms. "It's Sun Tzu's 'Art of War': It's about defense with diversity or defense with depth," said Chasin. False positives for "ham"--i.e. legitimate e-mail mistakenly identified as spam--are less than 1 percent, he added.

In August, MX Logic launched a beta test of a new "spam-containment" solution, "a revolutionary way to look at the spam problem," touted Chasin. "It works on the outbound stream. As we are successful in deploying the technology to the marketplace...