Cybersecurity Vendor Proofpoint Goes Private in a 12.3 Billion Deal

Do you know that approximately 300 billion passwords all across the globe are used by machines and humans? These passwords are lost effortlessly via sophisticated cyberattacks. Also, 36 billion records were exposed during the initial months of 2020. 

Cyberattacks have been rated as the 5th top-rated risk since after the endemic of COVID-19. Data breaching activities and cyberattacks are progressing swiftly from the past few decades since everything was prone to digitization and technological advancements. Sadly, cybercriminals are up-pacing at a swift pace in parallel to the tech innovations. This leads us to the fact that it’s high time for businesses to invest a hefty amount in the enhancement of cybersecurity protocols. According to Gartner, the worldwide information security market is forecast to strike the figure of $170.4 billion by the year 2022. Even in recent years, private equity firms are spending record amounts on software. 

“Thoma Bravo affirmed that it’s buying a security software vendor named Proofpoint in a deal which was valued at $12.3 billion. This announcement came right after the four days when Thoma closed its previous top cloud purchase, which was the acquisition of $10.2 billion of RealPage. ”

About Thoma Bravo

The leading private equity firm, Thoma Bravo has more than 40 years of history, also including more than 76 billion in assets under management. Thoma bravo mainly focuses on investing in technology and software companies. Thoma bravo pioneered the buy and build investment strategy and they first applied this strategy to technology and software industries more than 20 years ago. This firm has acquired 300+ technology and software companies, representing over $85 billion of value. The investment philosophy of Thoma bravo is centered around working collaboratively with the existing management teams to assist drive innovations and operating results. 

“What’s” and “How’s” of Proofpoint

Talking of Thoma Bravo’s acquisition of Proofpoint, let us acknowledge ourselves about some basic questions about Proofpoint: what is Proofpoint, and How Proofpoint works? 

What is Proofpoint? 

The cybersecurity platform, Proofpoint mainly focuses on the protection of workers for evolving cybercriminals that usually set an aim to mobile devices, social media, and email.  The cloud-based protection and email protection provided by Proofpoint permit organizations to effortlessly filter their inbox and outbox. This software plays a promising role in user identification and protection from both known and unknown cyberattacks. These cyberattacks include imposter emails that mainly aim to dodge workers into sending money or sensitive business information, also called CEO fraud. This is a rapidly evolving threat that can result in significant company losses.  

How Proofpoint Works? 

Below are the robust non-neglectable features offered by Proofpoint. 

Multi-Layered Threat Protection 

The email protection feature utilizes multi-layered threat protection to identify known errors accurately and efficiently such as malware. Proofpoint also utilizes signature-based detection for threat protection and also employs dynamic protection analysis for global and local IPs to figure out which emails must be accepted and which must be rejected. 

Visibility 

The advanced and innovative message tracing feature provided by Proofpoint features a high-performance search engine that permits users to point towards hard-to-find log data. 

Control 

With the assistance of Proofpoint, email classification can be done in numerous other languages. Emails are categorized into certain quarantine categories on the basis of potential threats such as phishing, malware, bulk emails, adult content, etc. the analysis function helps in the identification of emails and gives less priority to those emails to limit inbox clutter. 

Thoma Bravo Acquires Proofpoint

“ The software-based buyout firm Thoma Bravo announced on Monday that it is ready to acquire Proofpoint. Inc which is a cybersecurity and compliance firm in a deal that was valued at almost $12.3 billion. “ 

This announcement came into being exactly after four days when Thoma Bravo closed its previous best cloud purchase which was the purchase of $10.2 billion of real page industry real page. The buyout firm has been developing a portfolio of cloud software vendors, which mainly focuses on those organizations that are selling at discounts on their peers and have faced slow growth rates. Proofpoint, which was discovered in 2002, went public 9 years ago and just surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue by offering such software that assists to combat malware and assists business protection employees from phishing and other evolving cyberattacks across the cloud and mobile devices. 

Analysts at Mizuho securities claimed that, 

“We consider it true that this is a splendid existence to a company that has significantly decelerated over the past 2 years.”

The revenue growth of Proofpoint decelerated from 24% in 2019 to18% in 2020, and 39% during the years before 2019. The biggest cloud software acquisition in private equity was observed back in the year 2019 before this Monday’s announcement. Other cloud acquisitions of Thoma Bravo include the $3.7 billion purchase of Ellie Mae in 2019. Other than that, the $2.4 billion acquisition of Talend was the biggest cloud purchase of Thoma Bravo.

A managing partner Thoma Bravo, Seth Boro claimed that, 

“Proofpoint provides incredibly compelling opportunities as a privately held company. We are looking forward to working with them in the upcoming years for continuous business growth and for the delivery of advanced and innovative threat protection in numerous ways.”

My Opinion 

Unquestionably, cybersecurity is reshaping the dimensions of security protocols. Cybercriminals are evolving and we are witnessing an unusual level of vulnerabilities. Considering the latest cybersecurity trends, organizations must take appropriate measures for the enhancement of cybersecurity protocols to combat progressing cyberattacks. In a report on Monday, Piper Sandler’s analyst said that with this immense evolution in scams, more firms are focused on protecting their email systems since last month, Microsoft exposed a hack of its exchange server. 

Talking of Thoma Bravo’s purchase, I believe that other firms must learn from this hefty investment for better customer experience and risk assessment. It’s high time for businesses to acquire robust solutions for the prevention of data breaching through vendors.