Dallas' Zix Corp. Pays $275 Million to Buy Cybersecurity Firm Nearly Twice Its Size

January 14 will go down as a "truly monumental day" in the history of Dallas email security firm Zix Corp., its CEO told investors Tuesday.A day after striking a $275 million deal to buy a Florida company that's roughly twice its size, Zix chief executive David Wagner said the acquisition of AppRiver will dramatically accelerate his firm's growth."Email is typically the first application that gets moved to the cloud, and this acquisition puts us squarely at the beginning of our customers' cloud migration," Wagner said in Tuesday's announcement of the deal.To finance the deal, Zix will draw on a $100 million investment from private equity firm True Wind Capital and a $175 million loan from SunTrust Bank and KeyBanc Capital Markets. It expects the transaction to close in the first quarter.AppRiver, headquartered in Gulf Breeze, Fla., started as a two-man operation in 2002 and grew into a company with more than 270 employees in Gulf Breeze, Atlanta, Austin, Canada, Spain and Switzerland. It provides cloud-based cybersecurity services and Microsoft Office 365 to about 60,000 customers.Zix expects the purchase to double its annual revenue to about $200 million by the end of 2019, the company said. Its 2018 revenue is expected to be $70.4 million, while AppRiver's revenue forecast for the same period is $97 million.  Continue reading...