Cybersecurity firm Proofpoint considers pre-IPO funding as it plots a return to public markets

Published

7 months ago

October 1, 2024

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Sumit Dhawan, CEO of Proofpoint, took the reins as head of the cybersecurity company in 2022, a year after it was acquired by Thoma Bravo for $12.3 billion. He’s been pushing the firm to consider strategic opportunities such as mergers and acquisitions of smaller cybersecurity players to boost the company’s market expansion and stimulate industry consolidation.

Proofpoint

LONDON — Privately-held cybersecurity firm Proofpoint is exploring tapping external investors for pre-IPO financing and the consideration of mergers and acquisitions of smaller cyber companies as it seeks a return to public markets in 2026, CEO Sumit Dhawan told CNBC.

“We are looking at potentially exploring public markets sometime in the next 12 to 18 months,” Dhawan, who took the reins as Proofpoint’s newly appointed chief in 2022, a year after the company was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo.

Dhawan added that the timing of Proofpoint’s IPO would still remain dependent on general market conditions as well as the outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Since Proofpoint’s 2021 buyout by Thoma Bravo and Dhawan’s subsequent appointment as CEO, company management has been pushing the firm to consider strategic opportunities such as mergers and acquisitions of smaller cybersecurity firms to stimulate industry consolidation.

Noting that there are currently too many players in the cybersecurity market, Dhawan said that Proofpoint is currently looking for acquisition targets that offer a “strategic fit” for the company — for the right price.

“It’s happened in many other technology spaces — it happened with infrastructure, it has happened in the application platform space — where you start building fewer providers but richer platforms and, as a result, there will be consolidation,” Dhawan told CNBC in an exclusive interview this week.

“There are at this point in time, 2,000 or so non-profitable cybersecurity companies that are venture-backed, so clearly they’ll either get consolidated or potentially not exist. Because there’s no way any market can have that many players. So it’s going to happen, it’s bound to happen.”

Dhawan said he’s finding there’s a bit of a “bid-ask spread” in the market currently when it comes to cybersecurity opportunities, meaning target companies are asking for more money at the sale price than the valuations they’re being offered. But he added that he’s seeing some “great opportunities” in the market.

The road from private to public

Founded in 2002 in Silicon Valley, Proofpoint makes technology that helps companies prevent phishing attempts and other cyberattacks across a range of platforms, including email, social media, mobile devices, and the cloud.

Proofpoint went public in the U.S. in 2012, but subsequently delisted after Thoma Bravo acquired the company in a $12.3 billion deal in 2021. The buyout came after investor concerns over a deceleration in revenue growth.

Now, Proofpoint is once again looking to tap the public markets.

“We are a little bit different from typical companies going to IPO,” Dhawan said. “They tend to be smaller. They tend to have a very different profile. They tend to have uncertainty in terms of profitability, and they tend to not be in position to easily consolidate.”

Taking Proofpoint public wouldn’t mark the first time a company Thoma Bravo acquired in a private equity buyout has done an IPO for a second time. In 2019, cybersecurity firm Dynatrace, which Thoma Bravo took private in a 2014 buyout, went public again in a New York listing.

Proofpoint CEO talks emerging corporate phishing threats

Proofpoint will go through “multiple rounds” of financing to expand ownership of the company by other private equity investors, Dhawan told CNBC, adding that private placements — sales of shares to pre-selected investors as opposed to general sales to the public — are among options it’s considering.

“We’re close to starting the process” for fundraising from investors beyond its private equity owners, Dhawan said. However, he stressed the firm hasn’t officially set off this process.

Proofpoint’s boss said he hopes that what separates his company from other tech and cybersecurity firms seeking a similar IPO route, is a good balance of growth and profitability, double-digit growth, and strong leadership in its market.

Technology

Amazon considers displaying tariff surcharge on low-cost Haul products

Published

22 mins ago

April 29, 2025

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Amazon considers displaying tariff surcharge on low-cost Haul products

Packages with the logo of Amazon are transported at a packing station of a redistribution center of Amazon in Horn-Bad Meinberg, western Germany, on Dec. 9, 2024.

Ina Fassbender | Afp | Getty Images

Amazon is considering showing a tariff surcharge on items sold via its site for ultra-low-price items, called Haul, the company confirmed to CNBC.

“The team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store has considered listing import charges on certain products,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “This was never a consideration for the main Amazon site and nothing has been implemented on any Amazon properties.”

Punchbowl News reported earlier on Tuesday that Amazon would “soon” begin displaying the cost of tariffs alongside the price of each product, citing a source familiar with the company’s plans.

The report drew the ire of the White House, which called Amazon’s reported plans a “hostile and political act.”

This is breaking news. Please refresh for updates.

Technology

Alibaba launches new Qwen LLMs in China’s latest open-source AI breakthrough

Published

8 hours ago

April 29, 2025

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Alibaba launches new Qwen LLMs in China’s latest open-source AI breakthrough

Qwen3 is Alibaba’s debut into so-called “hybrid reasoning models,” which it says combines traditional LLM capabilities with “advanced, dynamic reasoning.”

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Alibaba released the next generation of its open-sourced large language models, Qwen3, on Tuesday — and experts are calling it yet another breakthrough in China’s booming open-source artificial intelligence space.

In a blog post, the Chinese tech giant said Qwen3 promises improvements in reasoning, instruction following, tool usage and multilingual tasks, rivaling other top-tier models such as DeepSeek’s R1 in several industry benchmarks.

The LLM series includes eight variations that span a range of architectures and sizes, offering developers flexibility when using Qwen to build AI applications for edge devices like mobile phones.

Qwen3 is also Alibaba’s debut into so-called “hybrid reasoning models,” which it says combines traditional LLM capabilities with “advanced, dynamic reasoning.”

According to Alibaba, such models can seamlessly transition between a “thinking mode” for complex tasks such as coding and a “non-thinking mode” for faster, general-purpose responses.

“Notably, the Qwen3-235B-A22B MoE model significantly lowers deployment costs compared to other state-of-the-art models, reinforcing Alibaba’s commitment to accessible, high-performance AI,” Alibaba said.

The new models are already freely available for individual users on platforms like Hugging Face and GitHub, as well as Alibaba Cloud’s web interface. Qwen3 is also being used to power Alibaba’s AI assistant, Quark.

China’s AI advancement

AI analysts told CNBC that the Qwen3 represents a serious challenge to Alibaba’s counterparts in China, as well as industry leaders in the U.S.

In a statement to CNBC, Wei Sun, principal analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, said the Qwen3 series is a “significant breakthrough—not just for its best-in-class performance” but also for several features that point to the “application potential of the models.”

Those features include Qwen3’s hybrid thinking mode, its multilingual support covering 119 languages and dialects and its open-source availability, Sun added.

Open-source software generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available on the web for possible modification and redistribution. At the start of this year, DeepSeek’s open-sourced R1 model rocked the AI world and quickly became a catalyst for China’s AI space and open-source model adoption.

“Alibaba’s release of the Qwen 3 series further underscores the strong capabilities of Chinese labs to develop highly competitive, innovative, and open-source models, despite mounting pressure from tightened U.S. export controls,” said Ray Wang, a Washington-based analyst focusing on U.S.-China economic and technology competition.

According to Alibaba, Qwen has already become one of the world’s most widely adopted open-source AI model series, attracting over 300 million downloads worldwide and more than 100,000 derivative models on Hugging Face.

Wang said that this adoption could continue with Qwen3, adding that its performance claims may make it the best open-source model globally — though still behind the world’s most cutting-edge models like OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini.

Chinese competitors like Baidu have also rushed to release new AI models after the emergence of DeepSeek, including making plans to shift toward a more open-source business model.

Meanwhile, Reuters reported in February that DeepSeek is accelerating the launch of its successor to its R1, citing anonymous sources.

“In the broader context of the U.S.-China AI race, the gap between American and Chinese labs has narrowed—likely to a few months, and some might argue, even to just weeks,” Wang said.

“With the latest release of Qwen 3 and the upcoming launch of DeepSeek’s R2, this gap is unlikely to widen—and may even continue to shrink.”

Technology

Uber raises in-office requirement to 3 days, claws back remote workers

Published

10 hours ago

April 29, 2025

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Uber raises in-office requirement to 3 days, claws back remote workers

Uber on Monday informed employees, including some who had been previously approved for remote work, that it will require them to come to the office three days a week, CNBC has learned.

“Even as the external environment remains dynamic, we’re on solid footing, with a clear strategy and big plans,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees in the memo, which was viewed by CNBC. “As we head into this next chapter, I want to emphasize that ‘good’ is not going to be good enough — we need to be great.”

Khosrowshahi goes on to say employees need to push themselves so the company “can move faster and take smarter risks” and outlined several changes to Uber’s work policy.

Uber in 2022 established Tuesdays and Thursdays as “anchor days” where most employees must spend at least half of their work time in the company’s office. Starting in June, employees will be required in the office Tuesday through Thursday, according to the memo.

That includes some employees who were previously approved to work remotely. The company said it had already informed impacted remote employees.

“After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”

The company also changed its one-month paid sabbatical program, according to the memo. Previously, employees were eligible for the sabbatical after five years at the company. That’s now been raised to eight years, according to the memo.

“This program was created when Uber was a much younger company, and when reaching 5 years of tenure was a rare feat,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “Back then, we were in the office five (sometimes more!) days of a week and hadn’t instituted our Work from Anywhere benefit.”

Khosrowshahi said the changes will help Uber move faster.

“Our collective view as a leadership team is that while remote work has some benefits, being in the office fuels collaboration, sparks creativity, and increases velocity,” Khosrowshahi wrote.

The changes come as more companies in the tech industry cut costs to appease investors after over-hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic. Google recently began demanding that employees who were previously-approved for remote work also return to the office if they want to keep their jobs, CNBC reported last week.

Last year, Khosrowshahi blamed remote work for the loss of its most loyal customers, who would take ride-sharing as their commute to work.

“Going forward, we’re further raising this bar,” Khosrowshahi’s Monday memo said. “After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office. In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”

Uber’s leadership team will monitor attendance “at both team and individual levels to ensure expectations are being met,” Khosrowshahi wrote.

Following the memo, Uber employees immediately swarmed the company’s internal question-and-answer forum, according to correspondence viewed by CNBC. Khosrowshahi said he and Nikki Krishnamurthy, the company’s chief people officer, will hold an all-hands meeting on Tuesday to discuss the changes.

Many employees asked leadership to reconsider the sabbatical change, arguing that the company should honor the original eligibility policy.

“This isn’t ‘doing the right thing’ for your employees,” one employee commented.

Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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