- M&A
- August 3, 2022
- 4 minutes read
PE Firm Thoma Bravo To Buy Cybersecurity Company Ping Identity For $2.8B
If there’s one thing you can count on to happen frequently, it’s Thoma Bravo, the private equity giant, buying a…
If there’s one thing you can count on to happen frequently, it’s Thoma Bravo, the private equity giant, buying a publicly-traded technology company to add to its massive portfolio. This time, the acquisition target is Ping Identity (NYSE: PING), an enterprise security company.
- Thoma Bravo has agreed to pay $28.50 in cash per share of Ping Identity, a 63% premium to the company’s share price preceding the deal’s announcement. The cash payment adds up to $2.4bn. Including Ping Identity’s current debt load that Thoma Bravo will absorb, the deal’s enterprise value sums up to $2.8bn.
The biggest beneficiary of this acquisition will be another private equity firm, Vista Equity Partners, which currently holds a 9.7% stake in Ping Identity. Vista acquired Ping Identity in a $600mn deal back in 2016 and took it public three years later at a $1.1bn valuation.
In the ensuing years after Ping’s IPO, Vista regularly sold shares and trimmed down its stake from over 80% to the current level. With hundreds of millions of dollars from previous share sales plus about $240mn expected from this acquisition, Vista will definitely wind up its interest in Ping Identity with sizeable profits.
- Ping Identity provides cloud-based identity and access management software to help enterprises operate securely, preventing unauthorized and fraudulent access to internal systems. The company reported $299mn in sales and a $64mn net loss last year.
- Thoma Bravo, the acquirer, is one of America’s biggest private equity firms, with over $100bn of assets under management. Its current portfolio includes over 60 software companies generating more than $20 billion in annual sales, and Ping will be the latest addition to this arsenal.
- Lately, Thoma Bravo has raised record amounts from limited partners and deployed the funds for big acquisitions. This June, it closed a $10bn deal to buy Anaplan, a business planning software company, and a month earlier, completed a $2.6bn buyout of Bottomline Technologies, a payment processing company.
Barring regulatory or other unforeseen hiccups, this acquisition is expected to close in this year’s fourth quarter.
