INKY founder Dave Baggett (pictured above) says making life easier for MSPs has always been a top priority for the email security provider and its GenAI-powered platform. Now, as the industry is undergoing a seismic shift driven by both economic factors and agentic AI, “being part of a very large integrated platform is becoming more and more important,” says Baggett, and a key reason he sold INKY to Kaseya, which was announced last week at DattoCon 2025.
“We’ve heavily prioritized making it easier for MSPs to use INKY to provide the most secure email security platform, but also to spend a lot less time on admin work. This is now a serious priority for Kaseya and also is going to be massively accelerated by generative AI and AI agents,” Baggett says. “So it’s a good time for us to double down on this. We can’t do it by ourselves. That requires a platform, and it requires a lot more resources. I really wanted to be part of that next few years’ journey.”
Addressing the Email Security Problem
Email security remains a thorny problem and a perpetual cat-and-mouse game played against the bad guys. ”Email back in the day … there was no proof of identity,” Baggett says. “And we still really have this problem.” In addition, he explains, the fact that email is federated is both a key feature and a security weakness. “Nobody owns email. There’s no central email authority. That means there’s no one handing out identities. You could set up a mail server in your house and start mailing. That’s great. No one can censor it. It has explosive, unlimited growth because it’s purely organic. … but it also means that there’s no central authority, so there’s a lot less control over it. And often control and security go hand in hand.”
Attackers are getting more clever, too, he says. “One thing that’s really impressed me, not in a good way, is just how sophisticated some of these bad guys are.”
Importance of a Platform
He says it became increasingly clear to INKY that email security can’t be done in isolation. “We had two paths. We could join forces with someone bigger that already has a big platform, or we could try to independently develop one. That seems like a long and arduous and probably high-probability-of-failure task, trying to build a whole platform from a small company.”
The era of independent, single-point solutions is coming to an end, Baggett says. “[Kaseya] is the biggest software vendor platform in the industry, and we’re clearly going to see consolidation in the MSP community … So, then you’re thinking about which of the platforms do I want to work with? Kaseya is extremely compelling from that standpoint.”
As a successful startup, Baggett says INKY was in M&A conversations with others prior to the Kaseya acquisition. “It’s just part of the narrative. But there is a moment where, oh, this seems more serious. And I think earlier this year it became clear there was a real felt need, particularly around Graphus.”
MSPs wholeheartedly applauded the decision to acquire INKY. INKY will be available as a stand-alone product and included as part of Kaseya 365 User.
A Culture Fit
Baggett says a cultural fit was an important part of the decision to sell INKY to Kaseya. He’s no stranger to choosing the right fit for an acquisition. He co-founded travel search company ITA Software, which sold to Google for $700M in April 2011. “We felt that was a really good landing spot, and in fact, 90-plus percent of people stayed for a long time. Some are still there. So yeah, a good landing spot’s really important.”
In conversations with Kaseya leadership, Baggett says it became clear that company was “pivoting towards being more partner focused,” he says. “And that appealed to me because we’re very customer centric; we’re kind of fanatical about customer support. One of the concerns I would have with any acquisition by a large entity is that customer support gets short shrift. I had to be convinced that wouldn’t happen here.”
The INKY founder says both CEO Rania Succar and Chief Product Officer Jim Lippie have a sincere and disciplined approach to their vision. “It is not just going to be about maximizing money. It’s going to be about how we’re actually going to make the world a better place for MSPs. For me, that matters.”
Baggett says he is staying on board as are all of INKY’s 39 employees. “We are a pretty small company for what we do, and we’ve done that on purpose. We really only hire A players. And I think that’s both going to benefit [Kaseya], but also, I think we’ll be positively influenced by just the incredible resources at Kaseya. It’ll be a little bit of an adjustment, obviously, for us to go from being a small company to a big company, but I think there’s also a lot of benefits to it.”
The Indispensable MSP
At DattoCon 2025, Succar stressed the steps Kaseya is taking to make MSPs “indispensable” in this next era of AI and automation. MSP Success asked Baggett how INKY fits into that vision. “One, obviously, email security is an essential component of any MSP’s security offering,” he says, adding that Succar’s pledge to make Kaseya an API-first company is also in alignment. “There’s lots of information we can get from other parts of Kaseya through APIs … I think that’s a really important part of her vision that we fit into.”
Email security may seem boring and simple, Baggett says, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. “It’s really complicated. And so having a coherent and cohesive solution to that very complicated component means that other parts of the platform get the benefit of that. So the whole is going to be better than the sum of the parts, and I think we’re going to play a big part in that.”
