Email was the front door for most attacks on a company, and Mimecast stood in the doorway. Every message passed through its cloud before it reached a mail server. Mimecast scanned it for malware and phishing, saved a copy, and kept mail flowing if the company's own server went down. Two South Africans built it from London. By 2015 it had more than 600 employees in four countries and revenue growing over 30 percent a year.

One Service for Every Inbox

Peter Bauer and Neil Murray founded Mimecast in 2003 to make email safer. Their first service was Mimecast Email Security, delivered from the cloud at a time when most companies ran their own mail servers and bolted on separate tools. The bet was that one service could handle security, continuity and archiving together. Bauer became CEO, and Murray became chief technology officer. The company opened offices in the United States, Australia and South Africa.

Ten Dollars to Eighty

Mimecast priced its IPO at $10 a share in November 2015 and listed on Nasdaq as MIME. Revenue for its fiscal year ended March 2015 was $116.1 million. As companies moved their mail to Microsoft's cloud, Mimecast sold protection on top of it, and the stock climbed for years. In 2022 the private equity firm Permira bought Mimecast for $80 a share in cash, about $5.8 billion, and took it private.

Cover: Courtesan Reading a Letter, Ishikawa Toyonobu. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a woman reading a letter (email).