Transcript
We're coming to you live from San Francisco at the home of the RSA Cybersecurity Conference with about 40,000 of our favorite friends here at San Francisco in the Moscone Center. But it's wonderful to be here every year. It's my 22nd year coming to these RSA events. And I got to tell you, I just love being a part of this community, seeing friends, seeing family, seeing all the portfolio companies, partners, all the new technology. It gets me super excited. And today, my co-host, you all know, Robert Herjavec of Shark Tank fame. But you also probably know he's spent decades in cybersecurity. So we go way back to way back, way back, just a year or two, 20 years. And it's great to have a co-host with him. But also, we have a very special guest here in our night vision event series, Samit Dhawan from Proofpoint, now approaching his third year as CEO of Proofpoint. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming. Thanks for having me. Good to see you again, Robert. I told David, Robert was at our sales kickoff, getting our team fired up last year. And look, we beat our plan. So it's all Robert. It's all me, David. It's all me. The lucky rabbit sweat. I know you've made a lot of acquisitions Proofpoint has over the years. And recently you made one. Maybe talk a little bit about Hornet Security, the acquisition and what's going on there. And I'll let Robert ask the question, too. Yeah, I said we sort of looked at the fundamental belief system that drove Hornet was that AI is making so easy for threat actors to create sophisticated attacks that not just, you know, customers who were kind of had their either language or size as their immunity factor or the mode to prevent themselves from being attacked, they're going away. So we made two strategic decisions about a year, a year and a half ago. First, we said we would create sovereign solutions in every country and languages to protect using intent based models that can process threats in that language. The second one we decided was customer of any size. Is going to be immune and they want the best in class solution. We started seeing small customers, 50, 50 seats, customers through MSPs coming to us and saying they want the same sophisticated solution. So all the innovation we did for enterprise, it also applies to protect, but not necessarily how you control. So control framework of Hornet combined with threat protection from Proofpoint. It gives a best in class solution to MSPs. And we're seeing tremendous momentum after the acquisition, even though it's just been three months. We're ahead of plan. There are 35,000 MSPs in North America, as I'm sure you know. Yeah. And they're all desperately looking for a way to stay relevant. Do you see that as a big market where they're going to take you to market that way? Robert, we see it as an amazing market. We Hornet security built their success in only two countries, Germany and France. And they built a business that was north of 100 million in just two countries, 150 million dollars with a huge growth momentum, growing 25 plus percentage and significant repeatable partner engagement model. All because of it was tech driven. And we've already in a matter of few weeks since we launched the platform, we announced the platform about four to six weeks ago and we have a few hundred MSPs signed up. Wow. So we're very excited and very excited about the potential. That's so smart, because I think a lot of vendors we talk to or I talk to don't see the global opportunity. But, you know, I always say threat knows no language. The threat landscape is very similar across all countries. What do you hear from the MSPs about AI now with the Hornet platform? How do you put all those together? So with the Hornet platform, the solution has AI and AI security natively built in. With Hornet, all of that is a busy way. You just three, four knobs, your data is protected. Now you're ready to roll out. And the next thing you want to make sure that all of your human communication is happening also with AI so that training is happening with AI. It's built into Hornet. It's just tailor made. That's not how enterprises use it. And they'll never use it that way. But an enterprise solution is not viable for smaller businesses and MSPs either. It's sort of force fit. So why to try to have one solution be force fit to the other? That's why I like these two platforms that are connected together with one threat stack. By the way, your words are like music to our ears. You know, as I think about the threat evolving and with AI as a powerful offensive tool now, this is the protection we need because we know at the end of the day, spear phishing and attacks in these models are one of the most prolific attack areas we have in all of the markets. So very excited about what you're doing and proud of what you've accomplished. It's an incredible run. Last question for you. What are you doing in 2026? Do you see more building, more buying? What's the last words? Both. I think what is interesting is if you think about AI, AI, artificial intelligence, it's supposed to mimic humans. But now think about the risk that it creates to the enterprise. It's not people are viewing this as an endpoint risk. It's a network risk. No, it's a behavior risk. It's you don't know how AI will behave. You have to do that as a set of guardrails. And that has to be done through models that are detecting the behavior of all of your AI and matching it to the intent. And if there is drift, you have to make sure you stop it. Those are the two businesses we have always had. And we're leading solutions in that. And I'm extending those two solutions to AI agents. Customers want a single platform for when human and AI agents are working together. The intent and the behavior of those are protected the same way. And our intent is that we take activity. We already got this great trajectory on customer acquisition there, even though AI security is early. And 2026 is to put them together. I love what you said about drift, because you're right. The intent is there, but it tends to drift. And as you well know, in a world of high complexity, enterprises want simplicity. So if you can do it all on one platform, it's so much easier. Ladies and gentlemen, Samit Dhawan, the CEO of Proopoint. Thank you so much for coming on to the show. Congratulations on all the progress you've made with this company. I think it's one of the most important infrastructure companies we have in all of cyber. Keep up the great work. Thanks for coming on and good luck in 2026. Thank you for having me. Thank you.
