The JobsOhio team has continued to provide enthusiastic and engaged support as we grow and scale. In particular, they played a fundamental role in attracting our post-Covid Series B round with a couple of east coast VC firms. It’s harder for an Ohio-based startup to get attention on the coasts without strong support from investors like JobsOhio Growth Capital Fund that represent more than just capital.”

“We created our own new category, really, focusing on creating insights from this collaboration world and managing risk in it,” explains Jeff Schumann, Aware’s founder and CEO. What set them apart wasn’t just the technology-it was their strategic approach to growth.

The acquisition made strategic sense. Mimecast, a unicorn company with 13 global offices spanning North America, Europe, the United Kingdom, Africa, Australia, Singapore and India, serves 40,000+ customers including Netflix, CVS, Uber, and ServiceNow with its 2,000+ employees worldwide. The company needed exactly what Aware had built: AI-powered collaboration security that monitors internal communications across Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other platforms in real time.

Crucially for Columbus, the acquisition didn’t mean exodus. Aware’s offices remain in Columbus post-acquisition, keeping the talent and expertise in the region that helped build the company from the ground up. For Schumann and the Aware team, the exit represents more than financial success-it’s proof of concept for building world-class cybersecurity companies outside traditional tech hubs. “We built something here that a global leader wanted to acquire and integrate,” Schumann notes.