The deal market lives. For the second time this month, we woke up Monday morning to a big enterprise software acquisition. This time, it was IBM (remember that company?) buying data management firm Apptio for $4.6 billion from Vista Equity Partners. People with long memories of obscure enterprise software firms (you know who you are) will recall that Vista paid $1.94 billion to buy Apptio in January 2019. So, while this isn’t as big a deal as Nasdaq Inc.’s $10.5 billion buyout of Adenza from Thoma Bravo earlier this month, it’s a similar payday for Vista in return on investment terms. (For details of how Thoma Bravo pulled that deal off, see this).
And that’s not all. Also today, Databricks reached a deal to buy MosaicML for $1.3 billion, The Wall Street Journal scooped. It’s Databricks’ second purchase this month, after the data analytics firm announced on June 13 that it would buy startup Rubicon. Both Databricks deals reflect the gold rush for anything AI related. MosaicML’s blog post on its combination with Databricks declared that the deal will help “power generative AI for all.” Rubicon, for its part, has been “building storage systems for AI,” Databricks said when announcing that deal. Also on the AI startup acquisition front, TechCrunch reported that Ramp is buying an AI-powered customer support tool, Cohere. What a time for the artificially intelligent!
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