Proofpoint Announces 2021 Financial Results; Completes V-Shaped Recovery with Both Revenue and Billings Growing More Than 20% | Proofpoint US

SUNNYVALE, Calif., February 3, 2022 – Proofpoint, Inc. (the “Company” or “Proofpoint”), a leading cybersecurity and compliance company, today announced year-end financial results for 2021.   

“Our strong 2021 results are a testament to our team’s consistent execution and dedicated focus on protecting our customers from advanced threats and compliance risks,” stated Gary Steele, chief executive officer of Proofpoint. “As our business reaccelerates coming out of the pandemic, we see one clear trend: the risk is shifting to people. Our unique people-centric approach to threat protection, information protection, and compliance continues to win in the market, and the targeted investments we’ve made in expanding the scale of our team and our people-centric cybersecurity and compliance services will play an important role in our continued growth throughout 2022 and beyond. Proofpoint leads in protecting what matters most to CISOs in their fight against today’s big three risks: ransomware, business email compromise, and data loss, and we look forward to making further investments in protecting our customers and providing greater customer value in the years ahead.”  

2021 Financial Summary  

• Executed V-shaped recovery over the course of 2021, with both revenue and billings growing by more than 20% year-over-year 
• Grew new and add-on bookings by 25% year-over-year 
• Returned to our world-class renewal rate well above 90%, moving past the initial impact of the pandemic 
• Added over 800 new enterprise customers across our global operations, complemented by over 50,000 new customers deployed on our Proofpoint Essentials platform serving smaller businesses 
• Continued success with our bundling program, with nearly 75% of our customers now licensing three or more products 
• Completed a rapid and successful transition to operating as a private company, with an accelerated plan now in place to hire over 600 people in 2022 across all organizations and all locations  

“We saw exceptional demand for our services by new and existing customers in 2021, with solid momentum across our core email security and growing portfolio of emerging products,” stated Paul Auvil, chief financial officer of Proofpoint. “As a private company, our operating discipline remains unchanged from our eight years as a public company, with our guiding principle being to invest to deliver world class technology and customer service while driving profitable growth.”  

2021 Product & Innovation Highlights  

Over 85% of breaches involve a human element, which is why more than half of the Fortune 1000 rely on Proofpoint’s leading people-centric security and compliance solutions to mitigate their most critical risks, from ransomware, business email compromise (BEC), and supply chain threats to data loss across cloud, endpoint, web, and email. To meet the challenge of rapidly evolving threats, data loss, and compliance risks, Proofpoint has continued to invest in research and development at a rate that is over twice the industry average, delivering an ongoing stream of new technologies and capabilities to our customers to enable them to identify and stop these threats.   

Stopping the Threats That Matter: Ransomware, BEC, and Supply Chain  

Proofpoint has the world’s leading people-centric threat platform and continues to deliver the most effective unified solution, integrating controls across email, cloud, security awareness training, impersonation prevention, and phishing response automation to stop today’s leading threats. In 2021, we launched industry defining capabilities including the following:   

• Stopped over 100M malicious messages from ransomware-linked threat actors from reaching our customers, while giving them visibility into ransomware targeting trends and industry benchmark comparisons  
• Released Supernova, the latest generation of our machine learning-powered detection for impostor threats, which now stops tens of thousands of BEC attacks daily with unmatched efficacy 
• Enhanced our AI/ML capabilities for supply chain risk and credential phishing protection, providing industry leading visibility and remediation capabilities into supply chain compromise 
• Delivered AI-driven adaptive micro-learning modules for Security Awareness Training  

We were pleased with significant customer momentum both in the Americas and International regions in our Threat Protection platform over the course of Q4’21 where we continue to see acceleration in customers buying a broader suite of products from our portfolio. Such customers include for example, a leading Global 2000 financial institution based in Asia Pacific, which adopted Proofpoint’s P1+ bundle rather than competitive offerings from Microsoft and KnowBe4. The bank replaced products from Symantec, Cofense, and Dmarcian with Proofpoint’s integrated platform reducing complexity and overhead and greatly increasing their effectiveness for the #1 threat vector.

Reimagining How Enterprises Stop Data Loss  

Beyond world-class threat protection, Proofpoint also provides a robust set of cloud-based information and cloud security offerings which enable customers to defend their data no matter where it resides. Our platform brings together email, cloud, endpoint, and web data loss prevention (DLP) functionality, augmented by insider threat detection capabilities, with unified visibility, incident management/remediation, and configuration powered by a scalable cloud backend. Our recent acquisition of Dathena enhances our data-at-rest solution for Information Protection that includes disruptive ML/AI data-classification technology and strengthens our DLP capabilities. Notable 2021 highlights include:

• Our endpoint DLP with integrated Insider Threat Management capabilities was expanded to support additional work from anywhere data loss scenarios  
• To counter threats and data loss via the web, Proofpoint Web Security was released in June, providing proxy capabilities for our CASB and a cloud-based Secure Web Gateway    
• Acquired and integrated InteliSecure helping drive successful DLP deployments 

Today our Information Protection platform has thousands of customers protecting tens of millions of users. We saw nice acceleration in our data loss prevention wins, including several significant million-dollar Symantec DLP displacements such as a seven-figure deal with a Fortune 500 financial services, payments, and technology company that adopted Proofpoint’s entire DLP portfolio to replace legacy technology from Broadcom/Symantec. The company is leveraging endpoint, email, and cloud DLP products, along with Proofpoint’s Insider Threat Management capabilities, to advance the state of their protection for critical financial data and intellectual property as their workforce and IT architecture rapidly evolves and moves to the cloud. The company now leverages 11 Proofpoint products in total.   

Reducing Compliance Risk in a Work From Anywhere World  

Proofpoint’s Archive & Compliance offering provides a unique people-centric solution paced with innovation across business communication tools to better capture, store, supervise, e-discover, and give proof of communications compliance. Our solution continues to be the global leader in supporting large financial service organizations, and we continue to build our Archive & Compliance capabilities to keep pace with the evolving scope of communication channels.  

We added several critical capabilities to continue to enhance our offering, and notable highlights from 2021 include: 

• Released NexusAI for Compliance to allow organizations with supervision requirements to take advantage of multiple machine-learning models, reducing the costly human effort of supervision across any form of monitored communication  
• Enhanced our connectors platform to enable streamlined capture of data from Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Zoom.   

A notable customer win from the most recent quarter was a 12,000-user financial services organization that adopted NexusAI for Compliance. Once implanted, our machine learning modules helped the customer reduce their manual case reviews by over 65%.  

Product Leadership Market Recognition  

• Premier Security Company, Email Security – 2021 CISO Choice Awards  
• Global Email Security Market Leader for the Seventh Consecutive Year – Frost & Sullivan   
• Overall Enterprise Email Security Solution Provider of the Year – Cybersecurity Breakthrough Awards 
• Best Email Security Solution – 2021 SC Awards  
• Leader in Enterprise Email Security – Forrester Research, The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Email Security  
• Cloud Security Solutions – 2021 CISO Choice Awards  
• Leader for Enterprise Information Archiving for Tenth Consecutive Year – Gartner  

Transaction with Thoma Bravo  

Proofpoint closed the deal with Thoma Bravo, L.P. (“Thoma Bravo”) in the third quarter of 2021. Proofpoint’s last day trading as a public company was August 31, 2021, and Proofpoint’s common stock is no longer on any public market.

About Proofpoint, Inc.  

Proofpoint, Inc. is a leading cybersecurity and compliance company that protects organizations’ greatest assets and biggest risks: their people. With an integrated suite of cloud-based solutions, Proofpoint helps companies around the world stop targeted threats, safeguard their data, and make their users more resilient against cyber attacks. Leading organizations of all sizes, including more than half of the Fortune 1000, rely on Proofpoint for people-centric security and compliance solutions that mitigate their most critical risks across email, the cloud, social media, and the web. More information is available at www.proofpoint.com.  

Proofpoint is a trademark or registered trademark of Proofpoint, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks contained herein are the owners.