10 Hot Cybersecurity Companies To Watch In 2020

Many of the industry's fastest-growing vendors will have their hands full in 2020 integrating major acquisitions, completing their first year as a publicly-traded company, or rolling out new partner programs and technical capabilities.

Proofpoint

Proofpoint spent nearly $350 million on a pair of acquisitions in 2019 that are aimed at making the company stickier with partners and customers alike. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based cybersecurity vendor first agreed to pay $120 million to acquire network access vendor Meta Networks to help customers better protect people, applications and data as they move beyond the traditional perimeter.

Then later in 2019, Proofpoint acquired insider threat management platform provider ObserveIT for $225 million to better protect data across email, cloud, and the endpoint. The deal is expected to give enterprises unique insights into user activity by combining Proofpoint’s information classification, threat detection, and intelligence with ObserveIT’s endpoint agent and data risk analytics.

Wall Street rewarded Proofpoint’s continued push beyond email security by driving the company’s stock price up by more than 40 percent in 2019 to $115.28 per share. These new capabilities have also made Proofpoint more appealing to customers, with year-over-year sales growing by more than 24 percent in the first nine months of 2019 to nearly $645 million.