US cybersecurity company Proofpoint Inc. (Nasdaq: PFPT) has acquired Israel-US insider threat platform company ObserveIT for $225 million cash.
ObserveIT was founded in Israel in 2007 by Gabi Friedlander, Avi Amos and Avi Weiss. In 2013, US venture capital firm Bain Capital acquired control of the company as part of a $20 million financing round. The current ownership structure has not been disclosed.
The company's head office was transferred to Boston while its development center remains in Tel Aviv where 70 of the company's 150 employees are based. The Tel Aviv employees will become part of Proofpoint's development center in Israel.
In its acquisition announcement, Proofpoint said that it would, "extend its data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities with endpoint joining email, CASB, and data-at-rest to form an enhanced enterprise DLP offering. The combination of ObserveIT’s leading lightweight endpoint agent technology and data risk analytics with Proofpoint’s industry leading information classification, threat detection, and intelligence, will give enterprises unprecedented insights into user activity with their sensitive data, wherever it resides. In tandem, Proofpoint will invest in ObserveIT’s leading insider threat management solution, which empowers security teams to detect, investigate, and prevent potential insider threat incidents by delivering real-time alerts, and actionable insights into user activity in one easy-to-use solution."
Proofpoint added, "With more and more users accessing data from endpoints off the corporate network in both sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud apps, organizations need to ensure they have the most effective people-centric security controls in place to understand how, when, and where users interact with critical data and intellectual property."
This is Proofpoint's third acquisition in Israel in the past three years. The US company bought cloud security company Firelayers in 2016 and earlier this year it acquired Meta Networks, which has developed a platform for enterprise applications on the basis of zero trust network access (ZTNA).
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on November 3, 2019
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