Some big news in the corporate e-mail world today. Mimecast, a London-based e-mail management company with a sizable office in Waltham, MA, has raised a $62 million Series C financing round led by Insight Venture Partners, a New York private-equity firm.
Previous investor Dawn Capital also participated in the round, which brings Mimecast’s total raised to about $95 million since its founding in 2003.
It’s a big expansion round for the software company, which has just over 90 employees in the Boston area and says it is looking to double that number over the next year and a half. Mimecast has just under 350 staff worldwide.
The company makes Web-based software to help mid-market companies manage, archive, and secure their e-mail communications and systems. Mimecast says it has more than 6,000 corporate customers in Europe, North America, and South Africa, and has recorded better than 50 percent annual revenue growth in six of the past nine years.
I wondered if today’s financing signified a shift in strategy or management of Mimecast in the U.S., but the company says the deal is more about acceleration. “We’re going to grow faster in our current markets and expand faster into related products that we’ve talked about for a while now,” says Mimecast’s chief scientist Nathaniel Borenstein (an Xconomist). “It’s quite exciting.”
Last year, Borenstein gave us some hints about what kinds of innovations might be in store—things like accessing information across corporate e-mail archives in a secure way, and adding social/interactive tools to inboxes.
Mimecast’s CEO and co-founder, Peter Bauer, says the Internet “has the potential to democratize information management” for companies of all sizes. “We believe e-mail needs to be rewired if it is to continue to deliver real value to businesses,” he says in a statement. “We are working to make e-mail more collaborative and more interactive to realize the true value of the vast amount of unstructured data in e-mail stores.”
Which tells me my inbox, and probably yours, is not going to shrink anytime soon.
