Proofpoint

Not to be confused with Proofpoint Systems.

Proofpoint, Inc. is an American enterprise cybersecurity company based in Sunnyvale, California that provides software as a service and products for email security, identity threat defense, data loss prevention, electronic discovery, and email archiving.

Proofpoint, Inc.

Proofpoint Headquarters, located in Sunnyvale, California
Company type	Private
Traded as	Nasdaq: PFPT
Industry	Security software
Founded	2002; 23 years ago (2002)
Founder	Eric Hahn
Headquarters	Sunnyvale, California , U.S.
Number of locations	Offices worldwide: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States (California, Colorado, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia)[1]
Key people	Sumit Dhawan (CEO) Marcel DePaolis (CTO) Rémi Thomas (CFO)
Products	Identity threat defense Email filtering Email privacy Email encryption Email archiving Anti-spam techniques Electronic discovery Data loss prevention software
Revenue	US$1.050 billion (2020)[2]
Operating income	–US$95.196 million (2020)[2]
Net income	–US$163.809 million (2020)[2]
Total assets	US$2.498 billion (2020)[2]
Total equity	US$441.744 million (2020)[2]
Owner	Thoma Bravo
Number of employees	3,658 (2020)[2]

Proofpoint office in Toronto

In 2021, Proofpoint was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $12.3 billion.^[3]

History

The company was founded in July 2002 by Eric Hahn, formerly the CTO of 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.^[4] An additional $9 million in Series B funding led by New York-based RRE Ventures was announced in October, 2003.^[5]

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 spam email using 10,000 different attributes to differentiate between spam and valid email, in 2003.^[4][6]

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.^[7]

On April 26, 2021, Proofpoint announced that it had agreed to be acquired by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo.^[8]

Proofpoint co-founder & chairman Eric Hahn (left) with then-CEO Gary Steele (right) at Proofpoint's 15th-anniversary celebration

Products

Proofpoint products are designed to address advanced cybersecurity threats, regulatory compliance, and brand-impostor fraud (which it calls "digital risk"). These products work across email, social media, mobile devices, and the cloud.^{[9][10][11][12]}