PRESS RELEASE

LONDON., August 14, 2024 – Mimecast, a leading global Human Risk Management (HRM) platform, today announced the acquisition of Aware, a leading AI collaboration security platform, in a bold move toward its intention to revolutionize the way organizations manage and mitigate people-centric security risks. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“In the modern digital workplace, businesses’ most critical data and communications live online. While email and collaboration platforms like Slack® and Microsoft Teams are essential to keeping people connected and productive, they also pose significant risks to organizations,” said Marc van Zadelhoff, CEO of Mimecast. “The human attack surface has expanded significantly, and legacy tools weren’t built to understand the complexity of messages, @mentions, emojis and GIFs. It creates more vulnerability across organizations’ ecosystems, leading to security breaches, blind spots and missing context, and exposes businesses to the risk of regulatory fines, reputational damage and the loss of valuable intellectual property. Aware was built to understand, detect and mitigate risks to human behavior across the platforms where people work and collaborate. This forward-thinking approach and AI-driven capabilities will help us further expand our offerings and address the increasing risk.”

“The role of humans in cybersecurity, including the risks they pose and are exposed to, is serious but under-researched and misunderstood. Attempts to manage these risks have been ineffective, even with the advent of security awareness and training (SA&T). In recent years, human risk management has emerged, recognizing that breaches introduce a wide range of risks and related behaviors, including human error, privilege abuse and social engineering,” according to Forrester’s March 2024 Human Risk Management Solutions Landscape report.

Aware’s purpose-built platform and targeted AI models identify risks found in the unstructured data of workplace collaboration tools and are designed to prevent the loss of sensitive data, improve compliance, and mitigate human risk factors. The company’s advanced AI-powered capabilities leverage Mimecast’s existing investments in AI models and deliver state-of-the-art security and compliance for customers’ digital landscapes, including detecting impersonation across collaboration channels like Zoom, expanding Business Email Compromise (BEC) capabilities to include multiple major language models, and enhancing archiving capabilities to support multiple collaboration channels.

Aware is designed to integrate seamlessly with the collaboration tools organizations rely on, and the key business information and insights it collects provide unprecedented insight into workplace collaboration. These capabilities broaden and deepen Mimecast’s HRM platform capabilities, especially as workplace collaboration grows and security risks increase.

“Enterprises are facing new, dangerous security threats that extend beyond email and everywhere employees collaborate to get work done. In addition to the expanded attack surface, people have become the new endpoints and the greatest risk for every business, making it critical that Aware can leverage AI to understand context and behavior in conversations and surface real-time insider threats at scale,” said Jeff Schumann, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Aware. “AI is not a standalone solution that can solve all cybersecurity problems. We believe the true power of AI technology lies in its ability to understand the nuanced human element of threats. We are excited to join Mimecast in helping customers identify potential issues and opportunities within collaboration and better protect the collaborative workspace.”

This acquisition follows the unveiling of Mimecast’s groundbreaking HRM platform and human risk awareness and training offering, Mimecast Engage™, and more recently the acquisition of Code42 announced last month. Mimecast will continue to service and support its existing Aware customer base. Customers can expect to see some of the new technology incorporated into Mimecast products in the coming quarters.

Aware was advised by Guggenheim Partners, LLC on the sale to Mimecast.

About Mimecast

Mimecast is an AI-driven, API-enabled connected Human Risk Management platform purpose-built to protect organizations across the spectrum of cyber threats. By integrating advanced technology with people-centric pathways, our platform increases visibility and delivers strategic insight that drives decisive action, empowering organizations to protect their collaborative environments, secure their critical data, and actively engage employees to reduce risk and improve productivity. More than 42,000 organizations worldwide trust Mimecast to help them stay ahead of the ever-changing threat landscape. From insider risk to external threats, with Mimecast, customers get more. More visibility. More insight. More agility. More security.

Mimecast, Mimecast Engage, and the Mimecast logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Mimecast Services Limited in the U.S. and/or other countries. Slack is a trademark and service mark of Slack Technologies, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. All other third-party trademarks and logos mentioned in this press release are the property of their respective owners.

About Conscious

Aware’s AI-Powered Collaboration Security Platform transforms workplace conversations into actionable insights, empowering leaders to make faster, more informed decisions. Purpose-built ML models understand the unique human context of these workplace conversations, which happen across Slack, Teams, Cisco WebEx, Zoom, Reddit, Qualtrics, and WorkJam. Aware equips enterprises to apply this contextual intelligence to solve a wide range of use cases, from employee experience management to cybersecurity to eDiscovery. Platform APIs connect these insights to existing workflows for more than 2,500 different applications. The world’s most iconic brands trust Aware technology to make more confident decisions about their people, brand, and business. Founded in 2017, Aware is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio.