The ticker on the screen was MIME. Not by accident: in June 2010 Mimecast had hired Dr Nathaniel Borenstein, co-creator of the MIME email standard itself, as its chief scientist. A company that lived inside email had put the inventor of one of its foundations on staff, and five years later it listed on the Nasdaq under his creation's name.
Peter Bauer and Neil Murray started Mimecast in 2003, Bauer as chief executive and Murray as chief technology officer. Where they grew up and what they studied is not recorded in the sources available, and neither has shared much of it publicly. What is documented is the bet. Companies were drowning in email, running their own servers, losing mail and facing legal requests to produce it.
Where they grew up and what they studied is not recorded in the sources available, and neither has shared much of it publicly.
Their answer was to move the work to the cloud: management, archiving and protection, sold as a service for Google Workspace, Microsoft Exchange and Office 365. London became the global base, with Lexington, Massachusetts for North America.
What almost nobody saw coming from outside was how the email layer would turn into a security layer. As attacks moved through the inbox, a firm already sitting in the mail path was well placed to filter it. It bought Ataata and Solebit in 2018.
Then the cost of that position showed. In January 2021 one of its security certificates was compromised, possibly letting attackers intercept communications with Microsoft email servers. Some investigators suspected the group behind the SolarWinds breach, though that link was only reported, not confirmed.
In May 2022 Permira acquired the company in a deal reported at about $5.8 billion, ending its life as a public company. In January 2024 Marc van Zadelhoff replaced Bauer as chief executive, and Mimecast later bought Code42.
For a founder, the quiet lesson is positioning. Mimecast did not invent email; it stood at the point where every message had to pass, and it let that spot grow in value. The same spot also made it a target. Being essential is both a business model and a risk.