Imperva

Imperva was founded in 2002 in Redwood Shores/San Mateo, California, by Shlomo Kramer, Amichai Shulman, and Mickey Boodaei, initially under the name WebCohort. Kramer, a co-founder of Check Point Software (the company credited with commercializing the firewall), and Shulman and Boodaei set out to address a gap in perimeter-focused security: protecting the data and applications that attackers reach once they get past the network edge. The company shipped its first product, SecureSphere, in 2003 to monitor and protect web applications and databases, and rebranded from WebCohort to Imperva in 2004. Greylock Partners, via partner Asheem Chandna, was an early institutional backer and Chandna joined the board around April 2003, remaining a director for roughly a decade — making Greylock one of Imperva's longest-tenured venture investors alongside Accel Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, and Venrock.

Imperva went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker IMPV on November 9, 2011, pricing its IPO at $18 per share and raising approximately $90 million; shares reportedly jumped roughly 33% on their opening day. As a public company, Imperva broadened from its on-premises SecureSphere data/app security roots into cloud-delivered application security, acquiring Incapsula (a cloud WAF/CDN/DDoS provider), Skyfence, and Tomium Software assets in 2014, buying data-masking vendor Camouflage in February 2017 (and around the same time divesting Skyfence to Forcepoint for about $40 million), acquiring RASP vendor Prevoty in August 2018, bot-management company Distil Networks in 2019, and database-security company jSonar in October 2020. Leadership changed several times during the public-company years: Anthony Bettencourt became CEO in August 2014, Chris Hylen succeeded him as President and CEO in August 2017, Hylen departed in October 2019 (Charles Goodman served as interim CEO), and Pam Murphy — previously COO of Infor — was named CEO in January 2020.

In October 2018, private equity firm Thoma Bravo agreed to take Imperva private for $55.75 per share in cash, a deal valued at approximately $2.1 billion (about a 30% premium to the prior closing price); the transaction closed in early 2019, ending Imperva's decade as a public company. Under Thoma Bravo's ownership, Imperva continued to invest in cloud security, API security, and data security posture management, competing with cloud-security and CDN players such as Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, F5, and Radware in application security, and with data-security specialists such as Varonis in the data-protection segment.

Business model

B2B enterprise software/SaaS security vendor; sells application security (WAF, bot management, API security, DDoS, CDN) and data security (DAM, DSPM, data masking/discovery) products via direct sales, channel partners, and cloud subscriptions.

Subscription/license and support/maintenance revenue from enterprise and cloud security products; historically also SaaS-delivered application security (Incapsula/Cloud WAF) subscriptions.