Profile

Synacor Inc. is a technology and services company headquartered in Buffalo, New York. It provides managed portals and apps, advertising, email, authentication, and OTT video services. The company was founded in 1998 as Chek.com and changed its name to Synacor in 2001. Himesh Bhise currently serves as the CEO and Tim Heasley currently serves as the CFO. Beyond Buffalo, the company has offices in Boston, Dallas, London, New York City, Ottawa, Pune, Singapore, and Tokyo. In 2012, Synacor became a public company with an initial public offering of $5.00 per share. In 2015, Synacor acquired Zimbra, an open source email, calendaring, and collaboration software suite. In the same year, Synacor acquired NimbleTV. In 2016, Synacor displaced Yahoo! as the portal provider for AT&T and subsequently lost this business back to Yahoo! only 3 years later in 2019. Synacor also provides authentication for HBO Go. In January 1998, George Chamoun and Darren Ascone, roommates at the University of Buffalo, founded Chek.com, a Buffalo-based email infrastructure provider. It started as an affinity-branded free email provider, allowing users to create an email account at domains like Budweiser.com and Yankeesfan.net. Additionally, Chek.com provided a Business E-Communications solution[buzzword], allowing companies to outsource their email hosting to Chek.com, providing an outlet for businesses to maintain email and intranet systems internally. The stated aim of the outsourced email solution[buzzword] was to allow smaller companies to present a professional image similar to larger, established companies.[better source needed]