Private company

Thawte Consulting

Logo: ™/®Thawte Consulting, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons3

South African security services company

Thawte Consulting is a certificate authority (CA) for X.509 certificates. Thawte was founded in 1995 by Mark Shuttleworth in South Africa. As of 30 December 2016, its then-parent company, Symantec Group, was collectively the third largest public CA on the Internet with 17.2% market share.2 It is part of DigiCert.1 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 20, 2026.

Overview

1995Founded1

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Thawte Consulting (pronounced "thought") is a certificate authority (CA) for X.509 certificates. Thawte was founded in 1995 by Mark Shuttleworth in South Africa. As of 30 December 2016, its then-parent company, Symantec Group, was collectively the third largest public CA on the Internet with 17.2% market share.2

Corporate structure

Thawte Consulting is part of a group headed by DigiCert. 3 entities on record. Switch between the flow chart and the network, and select any entity to see its details.

Built from subsidiaries, stakes and holdings from Wikidata (CC0); major holders from Schedules 13D and 13G. Each entity in the chart links to its source.

The story

Founded by Mark Shuttleworth in 1995.1

Thawte was originally run from Mark Shuttleworth's parents' garage. Shuttleworth aimed to produce a secure server not fettered by the restrictions on the export of cryptography which had been imposed by the United States. The server, Sioux, was a fork of the Apache HTTP server; it was later integrated with the Stronghold web server as Thawte began to concentrate more on their certification activities.

In 1999, Verisign acquired Thawte in a stock purchase from Shuttleworth for US $575 million. Both Verisign and Thawte had certificates in the first Netscape browsers, and were thus "grandfathered" into all other web browsers. Before Verisign's purchase, they each had about 50% of the market. Verisign's certificate rollover was due to take place on 1 January 2000—an unfortunate choice considering the imminent Y2K bug. (Thawte had a similar rollover in July 1998.) The purchase of Thawte ensured there would be no business loss over Y2K.

Proceeds from the sale enabled Shuttleworth to become the second space tourist and to found the Ubuntu project through the creation of Canonical.

In August 2010, Symantec acquired Verisign's security business, including Thawte.

Thawte is now part of DigiCert with its acquisition of Symantec's web security assets in 2017.

From Wikipedia’s article on Thawte, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4

Leadership

Who has led Thawte Consulting, and when. Pick a name to see everywhere that person has worked.

Subsidiaries and ownership

Parent company

Owners

Former owners and parents

From Wikidata.1

Timeline

  1. 2010Acquired Acquired by Gen Digital1
  2. 1999Acquired Acquired by Verisign1
  3. 1995Founded Founded1

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

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