Barracuda Networks
More info
- Creator
- Dean Drako and others
- Released
- 2003
- Type
- Security company
The spam-filter box that grew into a whole shelf of security appliances for email and the web.
Founded in 2003 in Campbell, California, by Dean Drako and others. The first product was the Barracuda Spam Firewall, a physical box that strained out junk mail before it reached the mail server — simple to set up and priced for companies that didn't want to build filtering themselves. Web filters, backup, web-application firewalls and other appliances followed.
The model was the same as SonicWall's and Fortinet's: buy a box, not a project. The company went public in 2013, was taken private by Thoma Bravo in 2017, and was sold on to KKR in 2022 — the tour through private-equity owners that has become routine for mature security firms.