Check Point To Acquire Email Security Startup Avanan

Check Point will spend between $250 million and $300 million to buy Avanan, making it one of the biggest acquisitions in company history, larger even than its purchase of cloud security vendor Dome9.

Check Point Software Technologies has agreed to buy rising star Avanan to deliver best-of-breed cloud email malware protection and expand security to SaaS collaboration suites.

The San Carlos, Calif.-based platform security vendor said the combined Check Point-Avanan offering will be the only unified tool on the market to protect the remote workforce from malicious files, URLs and phishing across email, collaboration suites, web, networks and endpoints. Check Point will spend between $250 million and $300 million to buy Avanan, according to a source familiar with the situation.

“As a security company that would like to prevent threats, email is something that we need to be a dominant player in,” Eyal Manor, Check Point’s head of security product management, told CRN.

[Related: Check Point To Buy Secure Remote Access Startup Odo Security]

Check Point’s organic email security capabilities have historically been more focused on protecting on-premises gateways and Microsoft Exchange servers over the cloud, while Avanan primarily safeguards cloud-based email security products, Manor said. Avanan was historically sold direct to SMB customers in the U.S., although the company has branched out its routes to market in recent years, he said.

Avanan’s technology will simplify things for channel partners who provide SOC as a Service to their customers by making it easier to act and delete emails from user inboxes, according to Manor. Existing Avanan customers will benefit from wrapping Check Point’s threat prevention around the existing email security offering, and the company plans to expand protection to more SaaS applications in the future .

“By integrating Avanan into Check Point Infinity, organizations will be able to modernize legacy solutions with email security as-a-service and protect cloud email and collaboration suites from the most sophisticated attacks,” Check Point Chief Product Officer Dorit Dor said in a statement. “I am confident that with this new addition, customers will enjoy the best email security with the best cyber security capabilities.”

The reported $250 million to $300 million purchase price for Avanan will make it one of the most significant acquisitions in Check Point history, larger even than the company’s buy of public cloud security vendor Dome9 in October 2018 for a reported $175 million. Check Point’s stock is up $0.54 (0.43 percent) to $127.22 in trading Monday morning.

New York-based Avanan’s application programming interface deploys in minutes like an app and can be configured in a few clicks. The company’s API stops threats before arriving to the inbox for both internal and external emails using AI-based engines. Avanan protects more than 5,000 customers and more than 2.5 million inboxes, according to Check Point.

Avanan was founded in 2015, employs more than 100 people and has raised $41.4 million in three rounds of outside funding, according to Crunchbase. All Avanan employees are expected to join Check Point, including co-founder and CEO Gil Friedrich, who will become Check Point vice president of email security. The Avanan acquisition is expected to close within the next week.

“Avanan’s journey to reinvent email security is starting a whole new chapter,” Friedrich said in a statement. “By merging with Check Point Software, we are combining Avanan’s best in class A.I. that catches the sophisticated email-borne attacks everyone else misses, with Check Point Software’s unparalleled security capabilities and threat intelligence.”

This is Check Point’s sixth acquisition in the past three years, according to Crunchbase. The company brought remote access security startup Odo Security in September 2020 to help enterprises enable secure remote access for employees to any application. In December 2019, Check Point purchased serverless security firm Protego to help customers avoid having vulnerable code deployed into production.

A month earlier, Check Point bought security startup Cymplify to defend IoT devices against highly sophisticated attacks by hardening and protecting the devices’ firmware. In January 2019, Check Point acquired emerging web application and API protection vendor ForceNock to bolster its advanced machine-learning protection capabilities.

And three months before that, Check Point purchased Dome9 to help customers secure multi-cloud deployments across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. All told, Check Point has made 17 acquisitions over the course of its 28-year history, according to Crunchbase.