Email security provider Mimecast Ltd. announced today that it has acquired artificial intelligence collaboration security platform startup Aware for an undisclosed price.

Founded in 2017 as Nullable Inc., Aware offers a purpose-built platform and targeted AI models that identify risk in unstructured data found in workplace collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. Designed to prevent the loss of sensitive data, improve compliance and mitigate human risk factors, the company argues that collaborative platforms were never designed to handle the operation and data governance complexity of modern businesses.

Aware’s platform offers companies a unified view of their collaboration tools, helping them overcome the legal and compliance barriers to collaboration adoption. It also helps companies address data risks and concerns over insider threats.

While uncovering security risks, the platform also uses natural language processing to generate insights around employee sentiment and commonly discussed themes. The insights help organizations to build more empathetic and flexible, or “human-centric,” workplace models to drive productivity.

Mimecast plans to use Aware’s AI-powered capabilities to strengthen its existing investments in AI models. The goal is to provide state-of-the-art security and compliance for customers’ digital landscapes, including impersonation detection across collaboration channels such as on calls made using Zoom Video Communications Inc.

Aware’s technology will also allow Mimecast to expand its business email compromise capabilities by incorporating multiple large language models and enhance its archiving capabilities to support multiple collaboration channels.

“The human attack surface has expanded significantly, and legacy tools weren’t built to understand the complexity of messages, @mentions, emojis, and GIFs,” Marc van Zadelhoff, chief executive officer of Mimecast said in a statement. That, he added, creates “more vulnerability in organizations’ ecosystems, leading to security gaps, blind spots and missing context and exposing businesses to the risk of regulatory fines, reputational damage, and loss of valuable intellectual property.”

Aware, he said, was developed to understand, detect and mitigate human behavior risks in collaboration platforms. “This forward-thinking approach and AI-powered capabilities will help enable us to further expand our offerings and address the intensifying risk,” he said.

Coming into its acquisition, Aware had raised $76.9 million over three rounds, including a round of $60 million in October 2021. Investors in the company included Goldman Sachs Growth Equity LP, Spring Mountain Capital LP, Blue Heron Capital, Allos Ventures, Ohio Innovation Fund, JobsOhio and Rev1 Ventures Inc.

The acquisition of Aware is Mimecast’s third purchase of a tech company this year, having previously acquired human risk management solutions startup Elevate Security Inc. in January and insider risk management company Code42 Software Inc. in July.

Image: Aware