Mimecast which has built a business around archiving and securing Exchange Server email for law firms and other businesses, now has $ 62 million in fresh Series C funding to build new applications atop its cloud platform.
The latest round brings total funding to about $ 95 million and was led by private equity firm, Insight Venture Partners, with existing investor Dawn Capital also participating. This new cash brings total funding to a robust $ 95 million for the London-based company.
CEO Peter Bauer clearly sees opportunity beyond email archiving and collaboration to run on the company’s infrastructure ”Our top priority is R&D — we started building our platform in 2003 and now are ramping up the number of applications to run on it,” he told me this week. Bauer thinks there are lots of interesting things that use all that unstructured data from email.
Mimecast plans to expand sales and marketing – including building out the company’s channel partner roster especially in North America. Bauer also plans to double the company’s North America staff from the current headcount of 80, he said. US operations are based in Waltham, MA.
The company claims 6,000 customers including the Boston Celtics and has a particularly strong presence in law firms where proper email archiving is critical.
A few months ago, Bauer spoke to me about email fatigue — a problem Mimecast intends to address — and what it means for businesses.
“You hear about companies like Volkswagen switching off email after hours [to keep employees from burning out.] Many say there’s information overload problem with email and end users have expectations based on things like Facebook and LinkedIn,” he said.
“A lot of what they’re saying is right but the response is wrong … In reality email has to adapt to meet new needs and be more collaborative in a way inspired by social networking. Email is the anchor tenant in how collaboration evolves. Email has such substantial adoption, penetration, network effects — the kids who have sidestepped email haven’t had a job.”
