Tag Archives: thoma bravo

Thoma Bravo to acquire RealPage property management platform for $10.2B

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The busy year in M&A continued this weekend when private equity firm Thoma Bravo announced it was acquiring RealPage for $10.2B.

In RealPage, Thoma Bravo is getting a full-service property management platform with services like renter portals, site management, expense management and financial analysis for building and property owners. Orlando Bravo, Founder and a Managing Partner of Thoma Bravo sees a company that they can work with and build on its previous track record.

“RealPage’s industry leading platform is critical to the real estate ecosystem and has tremendous potential going forward,” Bravo said in a statement.

As for RealPage, company CEO Steve Winn, who will remain with the company, sees the deal as a big win for stock holders, while giving them the ability to keep investing in the product. “This will enhance our ability to focus on executing our long-term strategy and delivering even better products and services to our clients and partners,”  Winn said in a statement.

RealPage acquires real estate IoT startup Stratis

RealPage, which was founded in 1998 and went public in 2010, is a typical kind of mature platform that a private equity firm like Thoma Bravo is attracted to. It has a strong customer base with over 12,000 customers and respectable revenue, growing at a modest pace. In its most recent earnings statement, the company announced $298.1 million in revenue, up 17% year over year. That puts it on a run rate of over $1 billion.

Under the terms of the deal, Thoma Bravo will pay RealPage stockholders $88.75 in cash per share. That is a premium of more 30% over the $67.83 closing price on December 18th. The transaction is subject to standard regulatory review, and the RealPage board will have a 45-day “go shop” window to see if it can find a better price. Given the premium pricing on this deal, that isn’t likely, but it will have the opportunity to try.

2020’s top 10 enterprise M&A deals totaled a staggering $165B


By Ron Miller

Thoma Bravo acquires Flexera for second time paying $2.85B

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Thoma Bravo must really like Flexera, an IT asset management company out of Chicago. The private equity firm bought the company for the second time today. Sources told TechCrunch the price was $2.85 billion.

Technically, Thoma Bravo is getting a majority stake in the company, buying it from previous owners TA Associates and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board. The firm originally bought Flexera in 2008 from Macrovision for just $200 million. It turned it around just three years later in 2011 for $1 billion profit, according to reports.

While reports last year had the company’s investors looking for $3 billion, they didn’t quite reach that mark, but it’s still a hefty profit as the company continues to change hands, giving each of its owners a substantial return on investment.

At $2.85 billion, Thoma Bravo will have a bigger challenge on its hands to make that same kind of return, but it sees a company it liked before and it still likes it, especially the management team, which to some degree at least remains intact.

Private equity firms can offer enterprise startups a viable exit option

“Jim [Ryan] and his team have positioned Flexera for sustained growth by focusing on the strategic challenges enterprises face with complex IT infrastructures,” Seth Boro, managing partner at Thoma Bravo said in a statement.

Ryan was pleased to see the company’s value continue to rise and to connect once again with Thoma Bravo. “This is a resounding vote of confidence in the growth Flexera has shown and the strategic initiatives we’ve undertaken to address the exponential challenges faced by organizations today,” he said in a statement.

The company was founded in 2008 and has bought 12 companies along the way including five in the last couple of years, according to Crunchbase data. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of next subject to regulatory approvals.


By Ron Miller

Ivanti has acquired security firms MobileIron and Pulse Secure

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IT security software company Ivanti has acquired two security companies: enterprise mobile security firm MobileIron, and corporate virtual network provider Pulse Secure.

In a statement on Tuesday, Ivanti said it bought MobileIron for $872 million in stock, with 91% of the shareholders voting in favor of the deal; and acquired Pulse Secure from its parent company Siris Capital Group, but did not disclose the buying price.

The deals have now closed.

Ivanti was founded in 2017 after Clearlake Capital, which owned Heat Software, bought Landesk from private equity firm Thoma Bravo, and merged the two companies to form Ivanti. The combined company, headquartered in Salt Lake City, focuses largely on enterprise IT security, including endpoint, asset, and supply chain management. Since its founding, Ivanti went on to acquire several other companies, including U.K.-based Concorde Solutions and RES Software.

If MobileIron and Pulse Secure seem familiar, both companies have faced their fair share of headlines this year after hackers began exploiting vulnerabilities found in their technologies.

Just last month, the U.K. government’s National Cyber Security Center published an alert that warned of a remotely executable bug in MobileIron, patched in June, allowing hackers to break into enterprise networks. U.S. Homeland Security’s cybersecurity advisory unit CISA said that the bug was being actively used by advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, typically associated with state-backed hackers.

Meanwhile, CISA also warned that Pulse Secure was one of several corporate VPN providers with vulnerabilities that have since become a favorite among hackers, particularly ransomware actors, who abuse the bugs to gain access to a network and deploy the file-encrypting ransomware.

As ransomware gets craftier, companies must start thinking creatively


By Zack Whittaker

Private equity firms can offer enterprise startups a viable exit option

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Four years ago, Ping Identity was at a crossroads. A venerable player in the single sign-on market, its product was not a market leader, and after 14 years and $128 million in venture capital, it needed to find a new path.

While the company had once discussed an IPO, by 2016 it began putting out feelers for buyers. Vista Equity Partners made a $600 million offer and promised to keep building the company, something that corporate buyers wouldn’t guarantee. Ping CEO and co-founder Andre Durand accepted Vista’s offer, seeing it as a way to pay off his investors and employees and exit the right way. Even better, his company wasn’t subsumed into a large entity as likely would have happened with a typical M&A transaction.

Ping Identity Opens Up About Its Financials As It Eyes 2017 IPO

As it turned out, the IPO-or-acquisition question wasn’t an either/or proposition. Vista continued to invest in the company, using small acquisitions like UnboundID and Elastic Beam to fill in its roadmap, and Ping went public last year. The company’s experience shows that private equity offers a reasonable way for mature enterprise startups with decent but not exceptional growth — like the 100% or more venture firms tend to favor — to exit, pay off investors, reward employees and still keep building the company.

But not everyone that goes this route has a tidy outcome like Ping’s. Some companies get brought into the P/E universe where they replace the executive team, endure big layoffs or sell off profitable pieces and stop investing in the product. But the three private equity firms we spoke to — Vista Equity, Thoma Bravo and Scaleworks — all wanted to see their acquisitions succeed, even if they each go about it differently.

Ping shapes new identity after $600 million acquisition

Viable companies with good numbers


By Ron Miller

Thoma Bravo completes $3.9B Sophos acquisition

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Thoma Bravo announced today that it has closed its hefty $3.9 billion acquisition of security firm Sophos, marking yet another private equity deal in the books.

The deal was originally announced in October. Stockholders voted to approve the deal in December.

They were paid $7.40 USD per share for their trouble, according to the company, and it indicated that as part of the closing, the stock had ceased trading on the London Stock Exchange. It also pointed out that investors who got in at the IPO price in June 2015 made a 168% premium on that investment.

Sophos hopes its new owner can help the company continue to modernize the platform. “With Thoma Bravo as a partner, we believe we can accelerate our progress and get to the future even faster, with dramatic benefits for our customers, our partners and our company as a whole,” Sophos CEO Kris Hagerman said in a statement. Whether it will enjoy those benefits or not, time will tell.

As for the buyer, it sees a company with a strong set of channel partners that it can access to generate more revenue moving forward under the Thoma Bravo umbrella. Sophos currently partners with 53,000 resellers and managed service providers, and counts more than 420,000 companies as customers. The platform currently helps protect 100 million users, according to the company. The buyer believes it can help build on these numbers.

The company was founded way back in 1985, and raised over $500 million before going public in 2015, according to PitchBook data. Products include Managed Threat Response, XG Firewall and Intercept X Endpoint.

Thoma Bravo makes $3.9 billion offer to acquire security firm Sophos


By Ron Miller

Mailgun changes hands again as Thoma Bravo buys majority stake

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Mailgun, an email API delivery service, announced today that it was selling a majority stake in the company to private equity firm Thoma Bravo. The companies did not share terms, but this is the second owner in the company’s 8+ year history.

Mailgun provides API services for building email functionality into applications. It has over 150,000 customers today using its APIs, according to data provided by the company.

In a blog post announcing the investment, CEO William Conway said the new money should help the company expand its capabilities and accelerate the product roadmap, a common refrain from companies about to be acquired.

“We will be investing millions in the development of products you can use to enhance your deliverability, gain more insights into your emails and deliver an unparalleled experience for your customers. We’re also doubling down on customer success and enablement to ensure our customers have exactly what they need to scale their communications,” Conway wrote in the blog post.

The company, which was founded in 2010 and was a part of the Y Combinator Winter 2011 cohort, has had a complex history. Rackspace acquired it in 2012 and held onto it until 2017 when it spun out into a private company. At that point, Turn/River, another private equity firm,  invested $50 million in the company. After today’s deal, Turn/River will maintain a minority ownership stake in Mailgun.

Mailgun typically competes with companies like MailChimp and SendGrid. Thoma Bravo has a history buying enterprise software companies. Most recently, it bought a majority stake in enterprise software company Apttus. It also has investments in SolarWinds, SailPoint and Blue Point Systems.

Thoma Bravo did not respond to a request for comment before publishing.

Email delivery service Mailgun spins out of Rackspace and raises $50M


By Ron Miller