About

Malwarebytes was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The Company provides tools for malware scanning and remediation on PCs and is one of the most widely used “PC Cleaners” for both consumers and professional IT Techs. Malwarebytes offers products for both personal and business use, including endpoint protection and response software, anti-virus and anti-malware software, browser guard, virtual private networks (VPN), incident response, vulnerability scanning, patch management, domain name system filtering, and more.

Insight & Approach

Our investment in Malwarebytes follows a long standing relationship with the business and its founder and CEO, Marcin Kleczynski. Our team partnered with Marcin and the rest of the Malwarebytes team to evaluate the Consumer and Corporate business lines as two distinct units. Given separate product needs, go-to-market motions, and customer segments, we developed a strong, operationally-driven thesis with the Malwarebytes team to separate the businesses and invest behind the profitable growth of each as a distinct business unit.

Vector Value Add

Given Vector’s experience in the security software market, Vector is providing strategic perspectives and guidance through its two (out of five) board seats at Malwarebytes. Vector is also collaborating with the Company’s management team to separate and grow both business lines:

• Driving an operational separation to allow each business unit to have separate systems, business acceleration strategies, management structures, KPIs / Financial reporting, etc.
• The Consumer business thesis is centered around accelerating growth in a highly profitable business by improving the demand generation engine and investing behind a broadened product portfolio.
• The Corporate business thesis is driven by a focus on targeting customer segments with the most attractive unit economics and adding business-user modules to expand cross-sell across the product portfolio.