This article is more than 1 year old

Webroot dunked in Carbonite: Should be quite well protected – if it survives the freezing process, that is

Backup biz slurps security firm for $618.5m

Online backup service Carbonite has inked a deal to buy Webroot for over half a billion dollars to help it fling cloud-based endpoint security at smaller biz.

The $618.5m acquisition will be financed through $550m in loans and cash on hand and is expected to close this quarter.

Founded in 1997, Webroot develops security tools for SMEs. It has around 600 employees, sells to 14,000 managed service flingers in the channel, has circa 300,000 customers and its fiscal 2018 revenues were $215m, up 14 per cent year-on-year.

Carbonite reported fourth quarter 2018 revenues of $77.0m, up 25 per cent, which produced a $719,000 profit. There was a $1.6m loss a year ago.

Its full fiscal 2018 revenues were $296.4m, up 24 per cent, with profits of $7.56m.

Webroot will be Carbonite's eleventh acquisition, with five before MailStore in 2014, EVault in 2016, DataCastle and Double-Take in 2017, and Mozy in 2018. Up until now, Carbonite has had no security tech, starting out as a backup-to-the cloud service for consumers. It has shape shifted into B2B data protection and can now twin that with security.

Carbonite is up against Acronis, Barracuda, Datto and Veeam in storage. Webroot competes with Avast, McAfee, Sophos and Symantec.

Mohamed Ali, Carbonite president and CEO, will commandeer the combined business, and Webroot CFO John Post will take the helm as general manager of the Webroot business unit.

Co-founder Stephen Thomas and business partner Kristen Talley sold Webroot to VCs in 2004 for $108m. Thomas was sadly found dead in Hawaii in 2008. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like