Symantec acquires TurnTide

TurnTide Inc. has been bought by Symantec Corp. for $28 million in cash, the company said Monday.

The Conshohocken, Pa.-based maker of anti-spam routers was founded in January with a $1 million venture funding led by TurnTide Chairman Josh Kopelman. It launched its product in February, meaning it only was doing business for five months before it was acquired.

Kopelman's previous company, Half.com Inc., was bought by eBay Inc. for around $241 million in stock six months after it launched its Web site.

"I thought the Half.com record was one I would never break," Kopelman said.

TurnTide employed 17, most of whom stayed with it to work for Symantec, Kopelman said.

Symantec is a Cupertino, Calif.-based developer of content- and network-security software, including the well-known Norton brand of products. It has a market capitalization of $12.81 billion and earned $371 million on revenue of $1.87 billion in its last fiscal year, which ended April 2.

The acquisition is a major validation of TurnTide's anti-spam technology, which was developed by its chief technology officer and co-founder David Brussin when he worked for the Paoli, Pa.-based ePrivacy Group.

TurnTide CEO Lucinda Duncalfe learned of the technology when ePrivacy Group recruited her to work for it. Rather than join ePrivacy Group, she bought the rights to the technology and started TurnTide with Brussin instead.

When attached to a network, a TurnTide router limits the bandwidth that the network makes available to computers it thinks are sending the junk e-mails called spam. That reduces the speed at which those computers can send out e-mail, thus reducing the amount of spam the network gets.

Spammers must send out thousands of e-mails at a time to make money. As a result, TurnTide's backers think the company's technology, if widely adopted, could end spamming by making it unprofitable.