Proofpoint, Inc. is an American enterprise cybersecurity company based in Sunnyvale, California that provides software as a service and products for Email security#Privacy concerns, email security, identity threat defense, data loss prevention, electronic discovery, and email archiving. In 2021, Proofpoint was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $12.3 billion.

History

The company was founded in July 2002 by Eric Hahn, formerly the CTO of Netscape, Netscape Communications. It launched July 21, 2003, after raising a $7 million Series A funding round, releasing its first product, and lining up six customers as references, and was backed by venture investors Benchmark Capital and Stanford University. An additional $9 million in Series B funding led by New York-based RRE Ventures was announced in October, 2003. The company released the Proofpoint Protection Server (PPS) for medium and large businesses. It incorporated what was described as "MLX Technology", proprietary machine learning algorithms applied to the problem of accurately identifying Email spam, spam email using 10,000 different attributes to differentiate between spam and valid email, in 2003. Proofpoint became a publicly traded company in April 2012. At the time of its initial public offering (IPO), the company's shares traded at $13 apiece; investors purchased more than 6.3 million shares through the IPO, raising more than $80 million. On April 26, 2021, Proofpoint announced that it had agreed to be acquired by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo.

Products

Proofpoint products are designed to address advanced cybersecurity threats, regulatory Regulatory compliance, compliance, and brand-impostor fraud (which it calls "digital risk"). These products work across email, social media, mobile devices, and the Cloud computing, cloud.

References

External links

* {{Official website 2002 establishments in California 2012 initial public offerings 2021 mergers and acquisitions Anti-spam Companies based in Sunnyvale, California Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq Computer archives Computer security software companies Networking companies of the United States Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Software companies established in 2002 Software companies of the United States Thoma Bravo companies