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
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US$1.050 billion (2020) [2] 
–US$163.809 million (2020) [2] 
