Last week, Cisco Systems agreed to acquire
Tuvey says that the company had several offers from large technology companies, but likely would not have acted on any of them had Cisco not come along. In fact, ScanSafe was looking to acquire others. The company had not yet spent any of the $10 million Series C round it raised late last year as a hedge against the downturn and as a “war chest” to buy companies.
“We picked Cisco purely because it was Cisco,” Tuvey says. “It was Cisco that made us do this.”
Cisco’s reach in distribution and its technology were too good to pass up, Tuvey says.
The transaction, for about $183 million in cash and retention-based incentives, is expected to close in Cisco’s second fiscal quarter, which ends in January.
Returns for ScanSafe’s investors look good and Tuvey says that the other suitors that wanted to acquire ScanSafe helped to put “a good value” on the company. Overall, ScanSafe—which develops technology to block malicious code that exploits flaws in Web applications—had raised about $32 million in venture funding from
ScanSafe’s employees will work with Ironport, an e-mail security provider that Cisco acquired nearly three years ago for about $830 million in cash and stock. Tuvey says that some ScanSafe employees will have expanded responsibilities at Cisco. —Deborah Gage