Proofpoint, Inc.

Proofpoint

Type	Public
Traded as	NASDAQ: PFPT
Industry	Security software
Founded	2002
Headquarters	Sunnyvale, California, United States
Number of locations	8 offices worldwide: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, United Kingdom, United States (California, Colorado, Indiana, Texas, Utah)
Key people	Chairman: Eric Hahn CEO: Gary Steele CTO: Marcel DePaolis
Products	E-mail filtering Email Privacy Email Encryption Email archiving Anti-spam Ediscovery Data loss prevention software
Website	http://www.proofpoint.com

Proofpoint is an enterprise security company based in Sunnyvale, California that provides software as a service and products for inbound email security, outbound data loss prevention, social media, mobile devices, digital risk, email encryption, electronic discovery ("eDiscovery”), and email archiving.

The company was founded in June 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. An additional $9 million in Series B funding led by New York-based RRE Ventures was announced in October, 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.

The company's first product was the Proofpoint Protection Server 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. The company joined dozens of other anti-spam software providers in a business opportunity fueled by an exponential increase in spam volume that was threatening worker productivity, making spam a top business priority. According to the 2004 National Technology Readiness Survey by the Robert H. Smith School of Business and Rockbridge Associates, Inc, the cost of spam in terms of lost productivity had reached $21.58 billion annually. The first Proofpoint Protection Server product upgrade was announced in November 2003 and expanded the number of spam detection attributes to more than 50,000.