“If I had to do anything differently, I would start marketing earlier, and bring Forabilis sooner. In fourteen months, we went from no marketing function to a machine that was generating content, building pipeline, and supporting our sales team, and the company was acquired. The results speak for themselves.”
| Company | Segasec |
| Industry | Cybersecurity |
| Challenge
|
A strong cybersecurity product with no marketing presence, no team, and no assets. The company needed to look credible, generate pipeline, and support partnership conversations- fast. |
| What changed | Forabilis embedded as VP Marketing, built the function from scratch, and turned the product itself into a content engine. |
| Impact | Acquired by Mimecast within 14 months of the marketing build beginning. |
Segasec had built something genuinely valuable: a platform that protected organizations from phishing attacks targeting their customers across the web. The technology worked. The team believed in it. But from the outside, the company was largely invisible.
There was no marketing infrastructure. No content, no lead gen motion, no thought leadership, no sales enablement. For a cybersecurity company trying to get in front of enterprise buyers and attract serious partnership conversations, that kind of absence has a cost. The product could win in a room. It just wasn’t getting into enough rooms.
Forabilis came in as VP Marketing, part-time but fully embedded. Not as an agency delivering briefs from a distance, but as a marketing leader sitting inside the company, owning the budget, setting the plan, and being accountable for outcomes. That distinction matters. It meant the work could move at the pace the company needed, without the approval lag that slows most early-stage marketing down.
The brief was clear: build the function, create demand, support the sales team with what they actually needed to close, and help Segasec look like the serious company it was, in a market full of well-resourced competitors who had been at it far longer.
The most valuable marketing insight came from looking at what Segasec’s platform could actually do. The product was capable of scanning the web at enormous scale, detecting phishing activity in real time. That capability wasn’t just a product feature. In the right hands, it was a content engine.
Working closely with Segasec’s analysts, Forabilis set up dedicated monitoring around major retail events: the moments when phishing attacks predictably spiked and when the online press was most likely to care. The data that came back was concrete, specific, and newsworthy. Significant spikes in phishing activity targeting major retailers in the lead-up to peak shopping periods. Exactly the kind of story that industry publications want to run.
The press coverage that followed was substantial. It positioned Segasec as an authority, gave the sales team credible third-party validation, and generated the kind of visibility that a startup with a limited budget can rarely buy outright. The product was doing the marketing work.
From the point Forabilis began building the marketing function to the acquisition, fourteen months passed. That’s a short window. A content marketing programme was running. Sales enablement was in place. The CEO had a thought leadership presence. Lead generation was building. Mimecast, one of Segasec’s first partners, acquired the company.
The founders were direct about what they would do differently if they ran it again. Start marketing earlier. Bring Forabilis in sooner.
It wasn’t the last time they did.
If you’re building something real and need a marketing function that moves at the pace your company actually requires, let’s talk.
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