Google has bought e-mail management company Postini from a consortium of venture firms for $625 million (€456 million).
Postini provides e-mail security and compliance solutions serving more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users worldwide.
August Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Sun Microsystems, Summit Partners, Pacifica Fund and Mobius Venture Capital all provided venture funding for the company.
David Cowan, from Bessemer Venture Partners, said Google will probably use the product to layer on message security services to Gmail making it much more attractive to businesses.
”Before we invested in Postini we looked at every anti-spam start-up at the time and what attracted us is it provided all its functionality in the network instead of in the hard drive,” he said. The real venture leadership on the board came from August Capital, Cowan added.
The deal is the third-biggest purchase Google has agreed.
The web giant paid $3.1 billion in its controversial acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick in April, although it is awaiting approval from the European Commission after competitors raised anti-competition issues. The deal, if it is granted permission, will give Google 80 percent control of third party advertising on the internet, Microsoft said in April.
The search engine also brought video streaming company You Tube for $1.65 billion in November.
