Vista Equity Partners will acquire Pluralsight in a deal worth $3.5 billion.
Announced on Sunday, the all-cash deal will result in Vista acquiring all outstanding shares of Pluralsight for $20.26 apiece, a purchase price including a 25% premium on average closing stock prices for the past 30 days.
Vista has partnered with co-investors, including Partners Group, to facilitate the purchase. The global investment company manages over $73 billion in assets with a focus on enterprise software, technology, and data.
Founded in 2004, Utah-based Pluralsight is an enterprise technology company with approximately 1,700 employees. The company focuses on workforce training and development, including data-driven course creation and deployment in subjects such as cloud technology, data science, security, and artificial intelligence (AI) through the Pluralsight Skills platform.
While the company’s first major product is designed for training purposes, Pluralsight’s second offering, Flow, has been designed for engineers and workforce management. According to Pluralsight, Flow provides insight into how long engineering teams take refactoring legacy code, and also provided analysis into project bottlenecks, commit risk, code churn, and project risk assessments.
Pluralsight says that its two flagship products are used by over 17,000 clients including 70% of Fortune 500 companies.
The announcement noted there was also “unsolicited acquisition interest” in a potential Pluralsight sale, but an independent committee decided that going with Vista was in the “best interests of Pluralsight and its shareholders.”
“We are relentlessly focused on helping enterprises improve and optimize their technology workforce and providing the most effective path to skills transformation for their technology teams,” said Aaron Skonnard, Pluralsight CEO. “The global Vista ecosystem of leading enterprise software companies provides significant resources and institutional knowledge that will open doors and help fuel our growth. We’re thrilled that we will be able to leverage Vista’s expertise to further strengthen our market-leading position.”
The acquisition was accepted by the Pluralsight Board of Directors and is expected to close in the first half of 2021, subject to regulatory approval.
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