How it started
History
Barracuda Networks was founded in 2003 by CEO Dean Drako, Michael Perone, and Zach Levow, and the company introduced the Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall in the same year. In January 2006, it closed its first outside investment of $40 million from Sequoia Capital and Francisco Partners. In 2007, the company moved its headquarters to Campbell, California, and opened an office in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Barracuda Networks expanded its research and development facility in Ann Arbor to a 12,500 square foot office building on Depot Street in 2008. By 2012, the Michigan-based research division had grown to about 180 employees, again outgrowing its space. In June 2012, Barracuda signed a lease to occupy the 45,000 square foot office complex previously used as the Borders headquarters on Maynard St in downtown Ann Arbor.
On January 29, 2008, Barracuda Networks was sued by Trend Micro over its use of the open source anti-virus software Clam AntiVirus, which Trend Micro claimed to be in violation of its patent on 'anti-virus detection on an SMTP or FTP gateway'. In addition to providing samples of prior art in an effort to render Trend Micro's patent invalid, in July 2008 Barracuda launched a countersuit against Trend Micro claiming Trend Micro violated several antivirus patents Barracuda Networks had acquired from IBM.
In 2012, the company became a co-sponsor of the Garmin-Barracuda UCI ProTour cycling team.
In January 2013, a backdoor was discovered: "A variety of firewall, VPN, and spam filtering gear sold by Barracuda Networks contains undocumented backdoor accounts that allow people to remotely log in and access sensitive information, researchers with an Austrian security firm have warned."
From Wikipedia’s article on Barracuda Networks, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3