Last year large-scale data breaches continued to dominate headlines, advancements in generative AI morphed into a double-edged sword for both adversaries and defenders and threat actors adapted their craft with blinding speed. Against this challenging backdrop for organizations, one constant remains: humans and their identities are the most targeted links in the attack chain.
At Proofpoint, we understand human risk in ways that others can’t, shedding light on who is attacked, whose behavior is risky, whose compromised account holds the keys to the kingdom, and who puts data at risk. This is precisely why organizations worldwide trust us to protect their people and defend their data.
2023: A Banner Year for Proofpoint and our Customers
We ended the year with tremendous business momentum, despite an uncertain economic environment. We had a record Q4 for new business, growing over 20% year over year and we exited the year with Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) up in the mid-teens. Notable highlights include:
- Our existing customers adopted our full stack of human-centric security solutions, across our strategic threat protection and information protection solutions, which contributed to an ARR growth of more than 20%. These include solutions for email fraud defense, identity threat defense, as well as information protection including insider threat management and multi-channel DLP.
- We added new customers, with over 1,200 new organizations entrusting Proofpoint as their cybersecurity partner of choice in 2023.
- We continued to see great market validation of our offering with a very healthy retention rate for our business with existing customers (90+%).
In addition, our recent acquisition of Tessian adds AI-powered behavioral and dynamic detection to give our customers the most comprehensive, integrated human-centric protection in the industry, with a flexible deployment model, leveraging both inline and API-based solutions. Together with the industry-first, AI- and ML-powered innovations launched last fall, Proofpoint now empowers customers to detect and defend against today's modern threats, fueled by one of the most comprehensive data sets available.
Our relentless innovation has not gone unnoticed, with Proofpoint winning Premier Security Company and Best Security Awareness at the 2023 CISO Choice Awards, the first-of-its-kind vendor recognition selected by a board of CISO judges.
2024: An Unwavering Commitment to Our Mission to Protect People and Defend Data
Protecting the human layer has never been more top of mind. In fact, Gartner has identified human-centric security as one of only three strategic imperatives for CISOs in 2024 and 2025[1]. Unlike other solutions that provide piecemeal, fragmented and incomplete protection at higher costs, Proofpoint delivers comprehensive human-centric security that customers can build on.
Our 2024 objectives are to:
- Expand our Human-Centric Security and Information Protection platforms with further innovations, so customers benefit from the most advanced threat protection available on the market. Our goal is to enable our customers to build a comprehensive human-centric security strategy that mitigates all four types of critical cybersecurity risks: targeted attacks, identity threats, impersonation and data loss.
- Leverage Proofpoint's unparalleled threat intelligence with industry-leading ML and AI to enhance our detection ensemble, stopping a broad spectrum of emerging threats targeting humans and preventing data loss. Furthermore, we will combine the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) & GenAI to offer a personalized user experience across our platform to streamline tasks and orchestrate incident response workflows with executive insights for human-centric security.
- Enhance our customer and partner experience by providing partners with integrated solutions that can be easily acquired by existing and new customers; by offering deep intelligence into their customers’ human risk profile; and by simplifying and automating our processes to scale our partner ecosystem and increase business velocity.
I am proud of what our team accomplished in 2023 and confident in our ability to deliver in 2024 and beyond on our vision to protect people and defend data. In a world where cyber threats seem to erupt at every corner, we are proud to act as the trusted cybersecurity partner and advisor to the world’s leading organizations.
[1] Gartner, Leadership Vision for 2024: Security and Risk Management; Tom Scholtz, Lisa Neubauer; January 2024