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Intersouth-backed Purewire in Atlanta is being acquired by Barracuda Networks

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ATLANTA – Purewire, a startup focused on software-as-a-service and backed by venture capital firm Intersouth Partners, is being acquired by Barracuda Networks.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Purewire raised some $3 million from Intersouth and the State of Georgia Seed Fund.

The Atlanta-based startup provides security solutions applicable for the emerging cloud/collaborative computing environment. It offers a SaaS solution as well as appliance devices and a hybrid of the two.

Barracuda develops content security appliances.

"The addition of Purewire's award-winning Web security-as-a-service platform to our security product portfolio greatly enhances our ability to provide customers with the best solution for their network environment," said Dean Drako, Barracuda’s chief executive officer. "Further, this combination expands our set of SaaS-based solutions, provides new infrastructure and technology, and creates enormous potential to extend our cloud services across all of our rapidly growing product lines."

Purewire co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Paul Judge will join Barracuda as vice president of cloud services and chief research officer.

Mike Van Bruinisse, co-founder and CEO, will become Barracuda’s vice president of enterprise sales.

Barracuda claims more than 85,000 customers worldwide.

“There is incredible synergy between the leadership teams of both companies; as former founding members of CipherTrust, Mike, Paul and other Purewire executives have strong roots in e-mail security and in delivering renowned enterprise-class products," Drako added. "Under their leadership, Purewire has helped to shape the Web security SaaS market in a very short period of time, and we believe that our combined forces will make Barracuda Networks the dominant player in the security SaaS market."

CipherTrust, which also focused on security, was based near Atlanta before being acquired in 2006.

John Glushik of Intersouth worked with Purwire.

"Over the last two years, Purewire has developed key approaches to malware analysis and threat data mining," Judge said in a statement. "With the formation of Barracuda Labs, we will be combining that expertise with Barracuda's existing threat detection capabilities, and the collective intelligence fueled by Barracuda Networks' more than 85,000 appliances deployed in 80 countries to create the most substantial view of network security threats in the world."
 

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