Enterprise IT security provider Rapid7 has a new CEO, announcing today that former president and chief operating officer Corey Thomas has taken over for Mike Tuchen.
Word of the CEO change came in a Friday news release, which buried the big news under some statistics about revenue growth and examples of its customers. No explanation for the change was given, although Tuchen was involved in grooming Thomas for the top job.
Tuchen, who started leading the company in 2009, is “currently evaluating a number of opportunities and will remain an outside advisor to the company,” a spokeswoman said.
Rapid7′s software scans an organization’s IT infrastructure—including routers, hubs, networks, operating systems, databases, and Web applications—to find security holes and patch them. It also checks whether a company’s systems are in compliance with accounting and privacy regulations.
It’s among the dozen or so Boston-area technology companies that have attracted $50 million or more in venture financing in recent years. Rapid7 has raised about $59 million, most of that coming in a $50 million Series C round from Technology Crossover Ventures in November.
Rapid7 has reported strong revenue growth, saying today that its third quarter sales grew 75 percent since last year, marking the 14th consecutive quarter of “record revenue.”
The company was listed on the 2012 Inc. 5,000 list of rapidly growing companies, reporting 2011 revenue of $30.3 million.
It also recently made a bit of news for its acquisition of Mobilisafe, a small Seattle startup that sells software for tracking security risks that employers face from the flood of mobile devices being used at work. Terms of that deal were not disclosed.
Rapid7 has been around since 2000, which means it survived two big economic downturns. Tuchen was originally brought in by Bain Capital, the company’s original VC investor. An engineer by training, he’d previously worked at Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, and co-founded Paramark, a dot-com-era online advertising startup.
In announcing Thomas as the new CEO, Rapid7 highlighted his work on the company’s 2009 acquisition of Metasploit and his role in the company’s international expansion. Thomas and Tuchen actually worked together previously at Microsoft, on its SQL Server product.
