Mimecast, which makes email security tools, says PE firm Permira plans to take it private in a $5.8B all-cash deal; Mimecast has been public since 2015
Nine months after competitor Proofpoint was scooped up by Thoma Bravo for $12.3 billion, Mimecast is also going the private equity route.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mimecast's path here was telegraphed: sources reported in late October that the email security vendor, valued around $4.5B on public markets since its 2015 IPO, was exploring a sale or investment. Six weeks later, Permira is paying $5.8B in cash — a clear premium to that public valuation.
The deal lands in a crowded lane. Nine months earlier, rival Proofpoint went private via Thoma Bravo's $12.3B buyout, and Advent took McAfee private at $14B just a month before this announcement. Email and endpoint security's largest independent vendors are being absorbed by PE faster than public investors can reprice them.
First-order effects
- Mimecast shareholders receive an all-cash exit at $5.8B, roughly a 29% uplift on the ~$4.5B valuation cited when sale talks surfaced in October, ending the company's six-year run as a public company.
- With Proofpoint already inside Thoma Bravo's portfolio, the two dominant names in email security are now both PE-owned, removing them from public-market comparison sets overnight.
Second-order effects
- Remaining publicly traded messaging- and SaaS-security vendors become the next screening targets for Permira, Thoma Bravo, and Advent, which have now each closed or announced multi-billion-dollar security take-privates within eight months.
- Enterprise buyers of email security face a consolidated supplier base: fewer independent vendors means less pricing competition at renewal time as PE owners push portfolio companies toward margin expansion.
Third-order effects
- If the 2021 cadence holds, mid-cap security software effectively migrates off public exchanges into PE portfolios, where longer hold periods favor consolidation plays — the Imperva template from 2018 scaled up an order of magnitude.
- Public-market investors are left with a thinner set of pure-play security names, which could either depress valuations for the remaining vendors (making them cheaper targets) or force them to grow into acquirers rather than targets.
The trend: Private equity is systematically taking mature, cash-generative SaaS security companies private, converting the sector's public independents into a handful of PE-owned platforms.