Vendor lineage
Cipher - the other one that was bought
A large Brazilian security firm acquired by a physical-security multinational, two years before the same thing happened to its rival.
Cipher was one of Brazil's larger cybersecurity companies until 2018, when Prosegur - a private-security multinational with more than 175,000 employees across 25 countries - signed an agreement for a majority stake.
Read beside the Tempest entry it makes a point neither makes alone. Within roughly two years, the two largest Brazilian specialist security firms were both bought by companies from outside the technology industry: one by an aircraft manufacturer, the other by a physical-security operator.
Both acquirers were buying the same thing - a digital capability they could not build at the speed their existing customers were asking for it. That is a specific market condition rather than a coincidence, and it is why the period saw so little Brazilian security consolidation between Brazilian technology companies.
Founding stories
Cipher
Cipher was founded in 2000 and grew into one of Brazil's larger cybersecurity specialists, running its own security operations centres rather than reselling somebody else's. The detail that matters for what came later is that it built a managed service: a business whose value is people watching screens around the clock, in facilities, under contract. That is an asset a buyer can absorb and keep running on day one, which is not true of most things a technology company owns.
The founding year and the founder's name are stated in Prosegur's own announcement of the acquisition, dated 10 December 2018, which is a first-party source for both. The city is not given there and is not invented here.
The timeline
- Prosegur buys a Portuguese security startup first
Before Brazil, Prosegur acquired Dognaedis, a cybersecurity company spun out of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal programme, in March 2016. Read forwards this looks like a footnote; read backwards it is the first move of a strategy, because a physical-security multinational assembling a digital division needs a second acquisition before the first one means anything.
- A guarding company buys a security operations business
On 10 December 2018 Prosegur announced an agreement for a majority stake in Cipher. Prosegur's own release put Cipher in North America, Latin America and Europe with two round-the-clock security operations centres, and the combined group at six. Eduardo Boucas, Cipher's founder and chief executive, stayed on as a shareholder and as Global CEO of Prosegur Cybersecurity; Alejandro Alonso, who had been running Prosegur's own cybersecurity unit, became Executive Chairman. The size of the stake was not disclosed.
Prosegur's release says majority without a percentage, and gives no price. Neither figure is stated here, because the only numbers available for this deal are the ones Prosegur chose to publish.
- The acquired name becomes the group's name
In 2019 every company inside Prosegur's cybersecurity division, Dognaedis included, moved onto one global brand: Cipher, a Prosegur Company. This is the part worth pausing on. The ordinary outcome of an acquisition is that the buyer's name survives and the seller's is retired within a couple of years. Here it ran the other way: the Brazilian firm's name was applied to the acquirer's own pre-existing cybersecurity unit and to its earlier Portuguese acquisition. Prosegur bought a business and then adopted its brand. Since then the naming has moved once more, and the division presents as Prosegur Cybersecurity with its xMDR platform under that name, so the specialist's brand was promoted over the buyer's and later superseded by it anyway.
The 2019 consolidation onto the Cipher brand is dated by CMU Portugal, writing about Dognaedis as its own alumnus company. The later move to Prosegur Cybersecurity is visible on Prosegur's current pages but no source located announces it with a date, so it is described here without one rather than given a year it cannot support.
- Baguete, 1 July 2020 - notes that in 2018 Prosegur, a private-security company with more than 175,000 staff in 25 countries, signed an agreement to acquire a majority stake in Cipher
Cipher appears here as reported context inside an article about Tempest, which is how the two Brazilian security acquisitions of that period are usually recorded together.
- Cipher, now Prosegur’s cybersecurity division - an industry directory records the company as founded in 2000, and Cipher’s own about page states more than twenty years of operation with over 200 cybersecurity professionals across five countries and six security operations centres
The 2000 date is stated in Prosegur’s own release announcing the acquisition (10 December 2018), which also names Eduardo Boucas as founder and CEO. A directory listing and Cipher’s own ‘more than twenty years’ phrasing agree with it.