Proofpoint Protect 2026 | Remi Thomas, Proofpoint

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Remi Thomas

Chief Financial Officer

Proofpoint

play_circle_outline Thoma Bravo-backed firm doubles to nearly $2.5B ARR after integrating Hornetsecurity and $350M MSP business

play_circle_outline Enterprise Vendor Consolidation Fuels AI Investment as GTM Upgrades Drive Growth and Major Deals

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Remi Thomas, Proofpoint

Remi Thomas

Chief Financial Officer Proofpoint

In this interview from Proofpoint Protect 2026, Remi Thomas, chief financial officer of Proofpoint, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how the company's growth strategy is evolving to secure the emerging agentic workspace. Thomas details Proofpoint's progress toward $2.5 billion in annual recurring revenue, fueled by organic growth and the integration of Hornetsecurity, a combined business now generating roughly $350 million in ARR and growing more than 20% organically. He outlines three areas of investment — collaboration security, data security and AI ... Read more

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What is the update on the Hornetsecurity acquisition and its impact on the company's ARR and go-to-market in the US? add

Is productivity being cited as a reason for consolidation, or are companies instead investing in productivity/efficiency gains to free up budget for AI? add

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Remi Thomas, Proofpoint

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John Furrier

>> Palo Alto Studios, connecting, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE here with Dave Vellante, my co-host. Hello, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here in San Diego as part of the NYSE Wired program and Open Community for Proofpoint Protect 2026 coverage. We're here with the CFO of Proofpoint, Rémi Thomas. Great to see you. I know you got a tight schedule. You got a lot of papers to sign, deals to close, customers to talk to. Thanks for coming on.

Remi Thomas

>> Thank you very much for having me.

John Furrier

>> So you guys had the big close of that acquisition, happen. That took some time. Obviously German-based company, coming together. how is it going and what's the financials look like? Because that's more growth. You get a lot of tuck-ins too that are filling in the products. So your growth opportunity, the TAM, is increased. AI is helping you. It's showing you the market. Give us the update on the acquisition.

Remi Thomas

>> Well, a lot has happened since last time I was on theCUBE, which was exactly a year ago at Protect. Different location, but same excitement. I'd say 3 things I want to highlight. Number 1, we've been growing tremendously. At the end of Q2, we're very close to $2.5 billion. We're like $27 million short, but who's counting?

John Furrier

>> Yeah, yeah. Round up.

Remi Thomas

>> I don't want to jinx it, but hopefully we'll be across the $2.5 billion mark for ARR by the end of Q3. So since Thoma Bravo took us private in '21, we've only doubled the ARR of the company and we're growing close to 20% today, including the acquisition of Hornetsecurity. Secondly, you mentioned it, we've integrated Hornetsecurity. We're super excited. We had a business in the MSP space that we contributed. So that business combined now is roughly $350 million. Of annual recurring revenue, growing more than 20% organically. And what we did is built our go-to-market capabilities in the US. And so excited about that.

John Furrier

>> So, let's take us through some of the progression. It's not really easy. I won't say turnaround, but really kind of a tune-up with Proofpoint go-to-market. But now as you get escape velocity, you had a couple big acquisitions, some tuck-ins, very acquisitive. How has that affected your growth strategy? Investment thesis? Where is your mind at now? How are you directing the capital?

Remi Thomas

>> We're investing roughly in 3 areas. In the space of collab security, it's really making an end-to-end portfolio so we can capture more of the wallet share of our customers. We introduced an API product, which is doing incredibly well. In the area of data security, it's building a fully integrated end-to-end solution with DLP, endpoint, email, cloud, DSPM, which enables the discovery of sensitive data and now AI security. And I'm sure we'll talk about this as well, an area where we're investing a ton. All of this is really designed, plus Hornet, which I already mentioned, to create a true platform addressing all of the needs of our customers in human and now agent-centric security and being able to address all of the use cases within our swim lane so we can be more relevant to our customers.

John Furrier

>> Are you guys growing on adjacencies? Are you thinking about other territory? What's the vision in terms of as you look at some of the organic and inorganic growth

Remi Thomas

>> opportunities?

>> great question. We really want to stay focused in our swim lane. We're not going to compete with CrowdStrike in XDR. We're not going to go after the identity guys. We're not going to do SecOps and automation. We're not going to do SASE. But within human-centric, agent-centric security, we want to cover all aspects of prevention. We want to prevent a human from clicking on an email he shouldn't click. We want to prevent a human from accidentally losing data, we want to prevent an agent from accessing sensitive data that they should not be touching.

John Furrier

>> Rémi, this focused execution mindset really is nice given this market. You can almost get too addicted to potential growth strategy. You highlighted that. And when you look at that platform play, if you look at CrowdStrike and Palo Alto, they stand out with the platform play. The others on the public side, on comps, are relatively flat. They have a hockey stick. On both fronts. And in CrowdStrike, you even had the hack. So they're still retaining customers, adding new products. There seems to be a nice spot for this human platform because insider threats are now agents inside out. We're hearing that. And with the knowledge graph and the way the models are decoupling, how is that changing your operating philosophy?

Remi Thomas

>> We, we see two fundamental trends happening. The first one is at the start of the year, we're all panicking when SaaS apocalypse happened. And there was a sense that basically AI was going to be very disruptive to the software industry in general and also to the cybersecurity vendors. And then the turning point for us was Mythos, where all of a sudden, yes, Anthropic was announcing something that potentially would be disruptive, which was basically the ability to scan vulnerabilities and expose vulnerabilities that you have in your code, but it was for the first time through Glasswing partnering with cybersecurity vendor to bring a common response to it. And that's the moment where I think the market realized that our CISOs are so concerned about adopting AI and not putting safeguards around it that they're going to need our help to make sure that they're able to safely deploy AI. And that's exactly when—

John Furrier

>> And they came to you guys with Glasswing you were part of that, Proofpoint was part of that?

Remi Thomas

>> We're now part of it. We were not at first, but we're now part of it. Okay. And obviously we'll be collaborating with them. So that's trend number 1. Trend number 2, is consolidation. We believe that for a company with a single solution, best of breed, there's going to be room. But when I discuss with CISOs or CFOs that I sometimes talk to, I see that in order for them to cope with the growing demands of funding AI adoption, they need to carve out some dollars. And typically, if they want to strengthen their cybersecurity posture and carve out dollars, the way to do that is consolidate. With fewer vendors. And Proofpoint is now their go-to for human-centric and agile security.

John Furrier

>> Has productivity come up as a consolidation or investment strategy? Because consolidation just cuts costs down, cost reduction, takes some cost out, but there's not a lot of budget for all the tokens being used. So the investment is coming from productivity and/or efficiency gains. Comments on that?

Remi Thomas

>> Absolutely. We recently won a large bank in Canada and we put together a proposal that was solving for 7 modules that they had provided by 4 vendors. This is a $25 million deal over 5 years, and we enable them to save meaningful dollars. The CFO wouldn't confirm how much, but I'm pretty sure they saved tons of money by consolidating with us, which in turn saves money for them to invest in AI.

John Furrier

>> customers are looking at a competitive edge in every transformation. That's where winners are determined. And these architectural shifts, which are happening at the same time, other companies that might be either investment targets or acquisition targets might not be as valuable standalone. Certainly for the customer, we hear point solutions aren't as valuable as a platform. How does that conversation go when you talk to a customer and say, okay, Proofpoint's got the platform, we're going to solve it, we stay in our swim lane, we'll look at opportunities that are compatible with that lane. Maybe an adjacency. What does that operating conversation look like for you and your customer?

Remi Thomas

>> I meet a lot of customers, and if we happen to have the one solution for the use case that we're trying to solve, bingo, we can address their needs. With AI though, and every company thinking about rolling out AI differently, we're not able to solve all the use cases. So what we're trying to do is understand what are the priorities of our customers. If we're able to meet their requests with organic investment, just enhancing the features of a product, great. If not, we did Normalyze as a great example of a tuck-in acquisition where we basically got the product features that we needed, faster time to market with a moderate investment. And you'll continue to see— we will continue to adopt that model.

John Furrier

>> What's the filter for acquisitions and organic and inorganic growth? Because there are a lot of targets out there that you could go after. You gave a reason why you've got the focused execution, but what's the internal, is it product-led growth, product roadmaps, revenue? What's the key principles?

Remi Thomas

>> The number one criterion is time to market. If it's gonna take us 18 months to 36 months to deploy this organically, it will be too late. So can we get basically our product out in 3 months? The number 2, which is my part, is can I write a check for it? Can I self-fund this acquisition? And we've been able so far with the margin and cash flow that we generate to be able to allow us to do several of those. We've done 7 acquisitions since the take

John Furrier

>> private.

>> got a lot going on. I'm sure there's a lot more. Thank you for spending your valuable time with me here in

Remi Thomas

>> theCUBE.

Remi Thomas

>> I appreciate it, Remi. I appreciate the

John Furrier

>> opportunity.

>> My name is John Furrier, I'm host of theCUBE. It's— we're in a whole new ballgame. Escape velocity, getting the models out there, get the data right, protect it. People are enthusiastic, but they got to get confident. We're doing our part here at Proofpoint Protect. Thanks for watching.