If you were thinking about selling your company for a couple billion dollars, now might just be the time to try it.
A day after Vista Equity Partners announced it would buy marketing automation software developer Marketo for $1.79 billion, the private equity firm has announced a second deal: Vista said today it is paying an undisclosed price for Denver-based Ping Identity. While it’s unclear whether it was another multi-billion dollar deal, Ping has raised $110 million in venture funding since its founding in 2002 and has said it expects annual recurring revenue to reach $100 million in 2016; it has also reportedly considered an IPO. Taken together, those factors could point to an even larger price tag.
Ping sells cloud-based security software that manages identity and network access to Web and mobile applications, such as Salesforce, Gmail, and Dropbox with one login. The company works with a wide variety of customers, from McDonalds to Eli Lilly.
Vista isn’t the only one making big M&A deals in the weeks preceding the start of summer. San Francisco-based Salesforce announced it is paying $2.8 billion for Burlington, MA-based Demandware (NYSE: [[ticker:DWRE]]). The deal adds software that powers online shopping platforms supporting Salesforce’s (NYSE: [[ticker:CRM]]) cloud-based software for businesses.
Vista, which has offices in Austin, TX, Chicago, and San Francisco, may not be content to stop after acquiring Ping and Marketo (NASDAQ: [[ticker:MKTO]]). Vista was named as one investor in a group that is mounting a bid to buy the core business of Yahoo (NASDAQ: [[ticker:YHOO]]), according to The Wall Street Journal and Recode, which reported that a sale of the Internet giant could fetch between $6 billion and $8 billion.
