Peter Bauer’s big bet on email: Mimecast’s journey from bootstrapped startup to email pioneer

Back in the mid-’90s, Peter Bauer, cofounder of Mimecast, was increasingly convinced that email was the future. So, in a time “before email mattered at all,” he trained as an email systems engineer. It was a bet that paid off. In 1997, he founded FAB Technology, a tech integration agency, which was acquired by Idion Technology Holdings just two years later.

“The deal gave me some financial flexibility, so I decided to see what I could achieve outside South Africa,” Bauer says. After moving to the U.K. in 2002, Bauer began importing and reselling South African software but struggled to get much traction. Associated with one of those vendors, however, was Neil Murray, his future Mimecast cofounder.

The two had a lot in common. Both had built companies in South Africa before relocating, and both had enough cash in the bank to take a risk on something new.

“We were also both very focused on email and its emergence as the number one mission-critical corporate tool,” says Bauer. “In just a few years, email had gone from a background tool you would check once in a while to the place where you spent your days. It was the heartbeat of communications inside an organization.”

“People would wake up in the middle of the night to check their emails.”

Their skill sets complemented each other perfectly. Bauer was a visionary business builder, focused on sales and brand; while Murray was “a genius Swiss army knife” that could “code, build, and prototype at an incredible rate.”

Becoming Europe’s market leader in email security

The pair raised $10M from angel investors and launched Mimecast in 2003 with an early software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to protect, manage, and optimize email.

“Neil and I saw the new risks that email posed to organizations,” Bauer says. “We saw that the volumes of data would create a storage burden. At the same time, everyone from marketing companies to scammers could contact anyone in an organization via email, so the inbound threats were starting to build up.”

Many different email security-focused companies had sprung up, each tackling an individual challenge, such as encryption, backups, archiving, and email add-ons — but Bauer and Murray were the first to try and solve all the problems at once.

At the time, none of Mimecast’s competition wanted to bet big on email’s longevity when other messaging client rivals like Slack and Facebook were vowing to become the market-leading platform of the future. “Incumbents didn’t re-up on the architecture because it was increasingly seen as a legacy technology,” he says.

Murray and Bauer had the foresight to know that was a mistake and used that space “to build momentum,” bootstrapping Mimecast to become a market leader in Europe.

“We were growing 300% a year. It didn’t occur to us that was unusual at the time, so it never went to our heads.” 

In 2008, Mimecast secured its first round of venture funding to support its expansion into North America. A few years later, the company raised a $21M Series B to further fuel its growth. By 2012, Bauer and his family had relocated to Boston to scale the U.S. business, marking a pivotal moment in the company’s expansion.

Due to Mimecast’s metrics, they secured meetings with 28 different investors. In the end, it was a choice between five firms, with representatives from each invited to London for an immersion day.

“I remember Jeff [Lieberman] and Hilary [Gosher] from Insight Partners sitting in our pokey meeting room and spending the day with us,” Bauer explains. “It just felt natural from day one. I knew that this would be a long journey, with setbacks as well as successes.”

“You need an investment team that really backs you…If that chemistry isn’t there, it’s like driving a car with a flat tire.” 

In 2012, Insight led Mimecast’s $62M Series C round, securing a 16% stake in the company.

Two things stood out about Insight, Bauer says: “Their calmness, and their breadth of experience around how to tackle the North American market.”

Leveraging Insight’s dedicated growth engine, Onsite, for help on everything from hiring to their U.S. go-to-market strategy to their eventual IPO preparation moved the needle for Mimecast. “Preparation starts years before the bell rings. We believe the companies that succeed post-IPO are the ones that build financial discipline early — eight quarters of consistent performance, the right KPIs, and a leadership team that understands how to operate in a public market,” says Gosher.

Scale up your career: See all open roles at Mimecast.

The investor POV

“Mimecast brought security and zero downtime to the businesses that depended on it. They had solutions for phishing before phishing really existed.”

“Following our investment, Mimecast grew really rapidly,” says Jeff Lieberman, managing director at Insight. “They were in the right place at the right time, with the right focus and leadership.” Insight helped build out the management team, advised on several acquisitions that helped build market share, and supported Mimecast in opening its new North American headquarters in Boston.

Lieberman believes that Mimecast’s impact cannot be overstated. “You have to remember that we take email for granted now, but when Mimecast was founded, email was still a nascent technology.”

Mimecast became a truly global powerhouse, with customers in Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, and the U.S.

“Peter was a visionary founder, and he just kept pushing and evolving Mimecast, while Neil was a brilliant technologist, introducing new security features and archiving aspects. Together, they were the yin and the yang,” says Lieberman.

Not long after Insight invested, it became clear that an initial public offering (IPO) was in the cards. Back then, however, an IPO was still a rare exit for a SaaS company. “There weren’t many listed SaaS companies at that time; Mimecast was in the early cohort,” says Lieberman.

While some large SaaS companies like Salesforce had listed, markets were still wary. Subscription-based revenue models were still relatively new, and while today it’s commonplace for tech companies that are not yet profitable to go public, this was less accepted in the early 2010s.

But Mimecast’s growth was undeniable. By March 2014, revenues for that fiscal year had grown nearly a third to $116.1M. It had more than 600 employees in nine offices around the world. It had even begun to turn a slight profit. “We were fortunate to have a business model and the predictability, and a big market opportunity and the rigor to do it,” says Bauer.

It was clear Mimecast was ready to go public, and in November 2015, the company successfully listed on NASDAQ.  “The IPO went really well,” says Lieberman.

“Peter was relentless. He understood that going public wasn’t an endpoint — it was a step in building a long-term, sustainable business. His ability to stay focused on the big picture while managing the day-to-day realities of an IPO process was a huge asset,” adds Gosher.

“Euphoric” is how Bauer puts it. “All of a sudden, a whole other constituent is interested in what the company’s doing in a way that just never happened before…  suddenly you become relevant because they could buy your stock.”

The 7.8M ordinary shares sold were priced at $10 each — when Permira acquired Mimecast in 2021, those same shares were priced at $80.

Such was the rapport between Lieberman and Bauer, Lieberman stayed on Mimecast’s board post-IPO. “That shows how impactful Insight has been over the years,” says Bauer. “Usually, investors leave the board post-IPO to exit their positions in an orderly way, but I asked Jeff to stay.”

“To this day, six years after Insight stopped being involved with Mimecast, I enjoy talking to Jeff and Hilary and getting their perspective on current events. That’s very powerful,” says Bauer.

“We made a bet on SaaS”

After 21 years, Bauer stepped away from Mimecast in January of 2024 to focus on other projects. “It has been an enormous privilege to build this company from nothing to $750M in ARR and employ 2,300 people,” he says.

“It’s taken more than a village — it’s taken a city of people to get us to this place. I’m just so proud that we created a business that is so robust that I can step away, and it keeps on thriving. We created an organization where people felt proud of their work and empowered to do a great job.”

More than 42,000 businesses worldwide now trust Mimecast to help them keep ahead of the ever-evolving threat landscape. Mimecast currently inspects 1.5B emails a day and blocks up to 250M attacks a month.

Lieberman believes Mimecast will go down as one of the most important technology companies of all time.

“Everyone said that email would be replaced by some new technology like Slack or LinkedIn, but here we are in 2025, and email isn’t going anywhere. Mimecast is a big part of the reason why no one else has ever usurped email in business communications,” he says.