Telegram has quietly updated its policy to allow users to report private chats to its moderators following the arrest of founder Pavel Durov in France over “crimes committed by third parties” on the platform.
The messaging app, which serves nearly 1 billion monthly active users, has long maintained a reputation for minimal supervision of user interactions.
On Thursday night, Telegram began implementing changes to its moderation policy. “All Telegram apps have ‘Report’ buttons that let you flag illegal content for our moderators — in just a few taps,” the company states on its updated frequently-asked-questions page.
The platform has also provided an email address for automated takedown requests, instructing users to include links to content requiring moderator attention.
It’s unclear how, and whether, this change impacts Telegram’s ability to respond to requests from law enforcement agencies. The company has previously cooperated with court orders to share some information about its users.
TechCrunch has reached out to Telegram for comment.
The Dubai-headquartered company has additionally edited its FAQ page, removing two sentences that previously emphasized its privacy stance on private chats. The earlier version had stated: “All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them.”
These policy changes follow Durov’s arrest by French authorities in connection with an investigation into crimes related to child sexual abuse images, drug trafficking, and fraudulent transactions.
Responding to his arrest, Durov posted on his Telegram channel, criticizing the action: “Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach.”
He argued that the established practice for countries dissatisfied with an internet service is to initiate legal action against the service itself, rather than its management.
Apple’s iCloud Private Relay, which helps protect paid iCloud users from online trackers, has experienced outages affecting major markets, restricting users from accessing web services and apps that use internet connectivity.
TechCrunch understands that iCloud Private Relay’s downtime has affected some Apple users in markets including Europe, India Japan, and the United States since at least Thursday. The sporadic outages are restricting users from accessing the web on the Safari browser and reporting internet connectivity issues on installed apps.
Apple’s System Status web page confirms the latest iCloud Private Relay outage and mentions that the service might be “slow or unavailable” for some users.
Launched in 2021 specifically for iCloud+ subscribers, iCloud Private Relay helps protect Apple users from online trackers by encrypting traffic going through customer devices. The DNS service sends requests using two separate internet relays to restrict web trackers and internet service providers to profile users by combining their IP addresses, location and browsing activity. It uses the Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS protocol that Apple designed in collaboration with Cloudflare in 2020.
If you are affected by the ongoing iCloud Private Relay outage, you can temporarily switch off the service by going to Settings > Profile > iCloud > Private Relay.
Image Credits: Getty / PowerSchool CEO Hardeep Gulati celebrates the company's NYSE IPO in July, 2021.
The private equity realm has been pretty active so far in 2024, serving as a powerful “alternative” source of liquidity for technology startups and scale-ups in search of an exit. Just this month, TechCrunch reported that EQT had picked up a majority stake in cybersecurity firm Acronis at a valuation of around $4 billion, following in the footsteps of another exit, in which EQT snapped up enterprise middleware company WSO2 for $600 million.
However, private equity has also been busy in the public markets, with some big deals going down to transform underperforming companies with strong growth prospects. According to PitchBook, there were 136 take-private deals led by private equity firms in 2023, up 15% on the previous year. New data provided to TechCrunch by PitchBook indicates that so far in 2024, there have been 97 such deals, meaning we’re roughly on course to match last year’s figure (give or take) if the current trajectory holds.
Of the take-private deals that have closed so far in 2024, 46 belong to the technology sector. TechCrunch has filtered through these transactions to identify deals specifically focused on product-centric companies (rather than IT consultancies or services firms), and pulled out all the acquisitions valued at $1 billion or more.
We’ve included transactions that have either already closed in 2024 or are set to close in 2024; this includes deals first announced last year.
Adevinta: $13 billion
Adevinta chair Orla Noonan and CEO Rolv Erik Ryssdal, with executive management, opening trading on April 10, 2019.Image Credits: Adevinta (opens in a new window)
Norwegian media group Schibsted spun out classifieds platform Adevinta as a stand-alone business in 2019. With existing online marketplaces in France, Spain, Brazil, and the U.K., Adevinta went on to acquire eBay’s classifieds business for $9.2 billion in 2020.
During the original spinout in 2019, Schibsted listed Adevinta on the Oslo Stock Exchange at a $6 billion valuation. In late 2023, news emerged that private equity firms Permira and Blackstone were leading a consortium to take Adevinta private in a deal worth 141 billion Norwegian crowns ($13 billion). That deal finally closed in May.
Squarespace: $6.9 billion
Squarespace IPO (2021).Image Credits: NYSE (opens in a new window)
U.K.-based private equity firm Permira announced plans to acquire website builder Squarespace in May, in an all-cash deal valued at $6.9 billion.
Squarespace filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021, shortly after raising $300 million at a $10 billion valuation. The company went on to reach a market cap high of $8 billion in mid-2021, but its stock went into free fall, dropping to a low of $2 billion in 2022. The company was already on the rebound this year, with its market cap soaring past $5 billion off the back of strong earnings, sparking Permira into action.
The proposed take-private deal is expected to close in Q4 2024.
Nuvei: $6.3 billion
Nuvei’s opening day on the Nasdaq in 2021.Image Credits: Nasdaq (opens in a new window)
Canadian fintech Nuvei, which provides companies with a range of services spanning payments processing, risk management, currency conversion, and more, entered into an agreement in April to be taken private by Advent International in a deal worth $6.3 billion.
The Ryan Reynolds-backed company originally filed to go public in 2020 on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), followed by the Nasdaq in the U.S. a year later. The company hit a peak valuation of more than $24 billion in 2021 before hitting a low of $2.6 billion in October, 2023.
The deal is expected to close in late 2024 or early 2025 at the latest.
PowerSchool: $5.6 billion
Hardeep Gulati, chief executive officer of PowerSchool, center right, rings the opening bell during the company’s IPO in 2021.Image Credits: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg / Getty Images
K-12 education software provider PowerSchool is in the middle of being taken private by Bain Capital, in a transaction that values the Folsom, California-based company at $5.6 billion.
PowerSchool was originally acquired by Apple in 2001 for $62 million in an all-stock deal, with Apple selling PowerSchool to Pearson five years later. Pearson then sold it on to Vista Equity Partners in 2015, with Onex Partners joining as investor three years later.
PowerSchool went public in 2021, with the NYSE listing giving the company an initial valuation of around $3.5 billion. It later surged to $5.5 billion in late 2021, before falling to $1.8 billion within a year and then hovering at around the $3.5 billion mark for the past couple of years.
The take-private transaction is expected to conclude in the second half of 2024.
Darktrace: $5.3 billion
Darktrace on the London Stock Exchange.Image Credits: London Stock Exchange (opens in a new window)
U.K. cybersecurity giant Darktrace is set to go private in a $5.3 billion deal spearheaded by an entity called Luke Bidco Ltd., formed by private equity giant Thoma Bravo.
Founded in 2013, Darktrace raised some $230 million in VC funding and reached a private valuation of $1.65 billion, before going public on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 with an opening-day valuation of $2.4 billion. The full valuation based on Thoma Bravo’s offer amounts to $5.4 billion on a fully diluted basis, with the corresponding enterprise value sitting at $4.99 billion.
The deal is expected to close by the end of 2024.
Instructure: $4.8 billion
Instructure’s opening day listing on the NYSE (2021).Image Credits: NYSE (opens in a new window)
Educational technology company Instructure first went public in 2015, but it was taken private by Thoma Bravo in a $2 billion transaction four years later.
In 2021, the private equity giant spun Instructure out once more as a public company on the NYSE, but its valuation generally hovered around the $3.5 billion mark. But KKR swooped in with a $4.8 billion bid in July, with plans to take the company private once more.
The deal is expected to close in late 2024.
Alteryx: $4.4 billion
Alteryx NYSE IPO on March 24, 2017.Image Credits: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Data analytics software provider Alteryx was taken private in a $4.4 billion deal.
Alteryx went public on the NYSE in 2017, with its shares soaring past the $12 billion mark in the intervening years. However, its market cap had been in free fall since 2021, hitting a low of $2 billion before Clearlake Capital Group and Insight Partners came in with their offer last December.
The take-private transaction closed in March this year.
EngageSmart: $4 billion
EngageSmart.Image Credits: EngageSmart
First announced in October 2023, Vista Equity Partners bid $4 billion to take customer engagement software provider EngageSmart private in a deal valued at $4 billion. EngageSmart went public on the NYSE in 2021, with its market cap hovering around the $2 billion to $3 billion mark until Vista Equity Partners tabled its $4 billion offer.
The transaction closed in January, with the EngageSmart brand now in the process of being discontinued and replaced by two separate companies: InvoiceCloud and SimplePractice.
Rover: $2.3 billion
The front lobby of Rover.com in Seattle.Image Credits: John Moore/Getty Images
Pet-sitting marketplace Rover went public on the Nasdaq via a SPAC in 2021. At the tail end of 2023, Blackstone announced its intentions to acquire the company for $2.3 billion.
That all-cash transaction finally closed in February, with Rover now a private company once more.
Everbridge: $1.8 billion
Everbridge goes public in 2016.Image Credits: Everbridge (opens in a new window)
Thoma Bravo first announced its intentions to acquire Everbridge, a critical event management software company, for $1.5 billion in early February. Following further negotiations, Thoma Bravo bumped that price up to $1.8 billion.
Founded in 2002, Everbridge went public on the Nasdaq in 2016, with its shares peaking at $6.4 billion in 2021 before falling below the $1 billion mark ahead of Thoma Bravo entering the the mix.
The transaction closed in July.
Kahoot: $1.7 billion
Kahoot on the Oslo Børs.Image Credits: Kahoot (opens in a new window)
Way back in July 2023, a consortium of buyers led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management announced it was acquiring gamified e-learning platform Kahoot in a deal worth $1.7 billion.
The announcement came a little over two years after Kahoot went public on the Oslo Stock Exchange, with the sale price representing a 53.1% premium on the last trading day before its investors’ specific shareholdings were publicly disclosed in May.
The transaction finally closed in January this year, with Kahoot delisting from the Oslo Børs stock exchange.
Model N: $1.25 billion
Model N goes public in 2013.Image Credits: NYSE (opens in a new window)
Model N, a platform that helps companies automate decisions related to pricing, incentives and compliance, went private in a $1.25 billion deal spearheaded by Vista Equity Partners.
Founded in 1999, Model N went public on the NYSE in 2013, though its valuation rarely ventured further north than $1.5 billion — a figure that fell to below $1 billion in the six months leading to Vista Equity Partners stepping into the fray.
The transaction concluded in June 2024, with Model N now a private company.
Apple’s iCloud Private Relay, which helps protect paid iCloud users from online trackers, has experienced outages affecting major markets, restricting users from accessing web services and apps that use internet connectivity.
TechCrunch understands that iCloud Private Relay’s downtime has affected some Apple users in markets including Europe, India Japan, and the United States since at least Thursday. The sporadic outages are restricting users from accessing the web on the Safari browser and reporting internet connectivity issues on installed apps.
Apple’s System Status web page confirms the latest iCloud Private Relay outage and mentions that the service might be “slow or unavailable” for some users.
Launched in 2021 specifically for iCloud+ subscribers, iCloud Private Relay helps protect Apple users from online trackers by encrypting traffic going through customer devices. The DNS service sends requests using two separate internet relays to restrict web trackers and internet service providers to profile users by combining their IP addresses, location and browsing activity. It uses the Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS protocol that Apple designed in collaboration with Cloudflare in 2020.
If you are affected by the ongoing iCloud Private Relay outage, you can temporarily switch off the service by going to Settings > Profile > iCloud > Private Relay.
Tumblr, the blogging site acquired twice, is launching its “Communities” feature in open beta, the Tumblr Labs division has announced. The feature offers a dedicated space for users to connect with others on different topics, outside of Tumblr’s main dashboard. The open beta comes six months after Communities launched in closed beta and represents a shift in focus for the social platform under its new parent company Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com.
Tumblr’s Communities are “semi-private” spaces that have their own moderators, rules and privacy settings. The feature is somewhat similar to subreddits on Reddit and Communities on X (formerly Twitter), both of which are now training grounds for AI.
Users can now request to create a community to be added to a waitlist. Tumblr Labs says there are currently more than 5,800 communities on the waitlist, and that it will be working through the list as quickly as it can to open the experience to more people.
The test feature adds a social networking aspect to Tumblr that takes the company beyond its core concept of blogging and publishing, allowing it to compete with platforms like X and Reddit.
Tumblr began testing Communities after it heard from users that they wanted better ways to connect with other people who share similar interests. With this new feature, users will no longer have to search to find blogs that focus on a given topic to find content they’re interested in, and could instead join a community.
Tumblr notes that Communities can be used for many different purposes. For instance, Communities could be used as a space for fans of a specific TV show, artist or book series to come together. Communities could also be used to create a dedicated space for your school, book club, friend group and more.
The potential sale of MariaDB to K1 Investment Management for $37 million is a capstone on the failed era of SPAC mergers that gained prominence for a brief time in venture circles during the last startup boom.
Remember SPACs? Special purpose acquisition companies, also known as blank-check companies, were used heavily in 2021 and 2022 to take a number of venture-backed startups public. The myriad combinations generated lawsuits, bankruptcies, and a great sum of deleted shareholder wealth.
And while some companies that took this shortcut to the public markets were speculative, others were more serious businesses — MariaDB was one such company.
After raising nine figures over a decade, MariaDB said it had closed a $104 million Series D round alongside a merger with Angel Pond Holdings, a SPAC. In its initial pitch, MariaDB said its equity valuation after the merger would be $973.6 million, with an enterprise value of $672.1 million — the difference in valuations here was attributed to a large fundraising event that would come as part of the proposed SPAC deal.
However, by the time the merger was closed, much of the SPAC cash was nowhere to be found. Some 99% of the shares held in Angel Pond were redeemed at $10 per share, removing $263 million from the deal’s value. The investors who chose to sell their shares in this way did better than anyone who stuck around, because MariaDB’s stock tanked sharply during its first day as a public company. Today, MariaDB’s stock trades at $0.36 per share, which is somewhat better than its 52-week low of $0.16 per share on February 2.
Modest rally aside, MariaDB has not lived up to its investors’ expectations. In its SPAC pitch, the company forecast its annual recurring revenue (ARR) to reach $53 million in FY 2022, and $72 million in FY 2023. It also expected revenue of $47 million in FY 2022 and $64 million in FY 2023.
But the company was an entire year behind its projected growth curve, reporting revenue of $53.1 million and ARR of $50.3 million in 2023. In the first quarter of FY 2024, MariaDB reported revenue of $13.6 million, up from $12.8 million a year ago. In addition to that modest improvement in top line, MariaDB also managed to more than halve its operating loss to $5.6 million and narrowed its net loss to $8.9 million from $12.8 million a year earlier. More importantly, the company dramatically reduced its cash consumption. And in the same quarter, its operating cash deficit improved to $1.4 million from $14.1 million.
But these improvements seemed to come a little too late: The combined effect of revenue increasing slowly and rapidly emptying coffers meant that MariaDB couldn’t go much longer without raising more money. It makes sense, then, that the company issued a “senior secured promissory note” to RP Ventures worth $26.5 million last October. That funding was used to satisfy the end of a term loan with the European Investment Bank. But the company went into breach of its rescue loan and now finds its options are limited.
That situation makes K1’s offer all the more interesting, since the terms of the RP note were clear regarding the limitations it set on the company. Presumably, K1 expects RP to clear a potential purchase of MariaDB.
MariaDB wound up going public while unprofitable, but without as much fuel as it might have hoped for. For any startup, this state of events is pretty much a worst-case scenario: You go public (more scrutiny) while losing money (cash reliant) against limited reserves (cash balance), coupled with a slowdown in the industry and a suddenly conservative valuation climate. You wind up cash-poor and without much equity value to throw around. Investors send your share price to effectively zero, and the value of all those years of work and roughly $50 million in annualized revenues becomes nil.
MariaDB makes for a two-part example. First, it’s a reminder of the exuberance that led to SPAC deals that were, in retrospect, too expensive and poorly timed. Second, it shows that not all software companies that reach modest scale, say annualized revenue of $25 million, are going to keep growing at a sufficient pace to sustain as a public company.
Beware exotic deals in heady times, and never count your future ARR growth as certain — even if you reach critical growth thresholds.
Image Credits: Onyx Private / Victor Santos, co-founder and CEO of Onyx Private
Miami-based Onyx Private, a Y Combinator-backed digital bank that provided banking and investment services for high-earning Millennials and Gen Zers, is terminating its bank operations.
In a March 13 email to a customer viewed by TechCrunch, with a subject line that read: “Important Notice: Termination of Bank Operations and Account Closure” Onyx wrote, “We are writing to inform you of our decision to discontinue our services and initiate the closure of all associated accounts starting today.”
Co-founder and CEO Victor Santos confirmed to TechCrunch that the company was “moving away from the B2C model” but said that it was changing its business model, not shutting down.
Y Combinator has listed the company as “inactive” on its website, something Santos could not explain. (Update: The text has since been updated post-publication).
He said Onyx will be shifting to a “B2B white-label platform-as-a-service model for community banks, regional banks, and credit unions” that want to launch digital apps built for young affluent consumers. Santos claimed that Onyx had been exploring the idea over the past year and had made developments with some partners.
Less than a year ago in May, the startup announced that it had raised $4.1 million in venture funding from investors such as Village Global, Y Combinator, Global Founders Capital, One Way Ventures, 186 Ventures and Olive Tree Capital. At that time, the company said that since its launch nearly a year prior, Onyx Private – which said it wanted to be the “next generation UBS” – had grown 30% month-over-month and was processing over $4 million in transaction payment value per month. It also claimed to be nearing $5 million in TPV (total payment volume).
Santos today declined to disclose how many banking customers Onyx had. Although a source told TechCrunch that regulatory issues may have played a part in this decision, Santos dismissed that, telling us that no regulatory issues caused the startup to shut down its direct-to-consumer banking operations.
He added: “It was purely a strategic decision that allowed us to leverage the base of existing FIs [financial institutions] and use the technology we have built to scale in a more capital-efficient manner.”
At the time of its fundraise, the company had named Piermont Bank as its banking partner. Today on its website, Onyx says that “banking services [are] provided by i3 Bank.” Santos told TechCrunch that Onyx “started with Piermont but transitioned last year to i3.”
Piermont declined to comment. TechCrunch has reached out to i3 for comment.
In the email, banking customers were told that the shut-down will take place on April 14 but that “cessation of our rewards program” was “effective immediately.”
Are you a fintech employee or insider with insight to share? Contact Mary Ann Azevedo via email at [email protected] or through encrypted app Signal at 408.204.3036.
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OctoAI (formerly known as OctoML), announced the launch of OctoStack, its new end-to-end solution for deploying generative AI models in a company’s private cloud, be that on-premises or in a virtual private cloud from one of the major vendors, including AWS, Google, Microsoft and Azure, as well as CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, Snowflake and others.
In its early days, OctoAI focused almost exclusively on optimizing models to run more effectively. Based on the Apache TVM machine learning compiler framework, the company then launched its TVM-as-a-Service platform and, over time, expanded that into a fully fledged model-serving offering that combined its optimization chops with a DevOps platform. With the rise of generative AI, the team then launched the fully managed OctoAI platform to help its users serve and fine-tune existing models. OctoStack, at its core, is that OctoAI platform, but for private deployments.
Image Credits: OctoAI
OctoAI CEO and co-founder Luis Ceze told me the company has over 25,000 developers on the platform and hundreds of paying customers who use it in production. A lot of these companies, Ceze said, are GenAI-native companies. The market of traditional enterprises wanting to adopt generative AI is significantly larger, though, so it’s maybe no surprise that OctoAI is now going after them as well with OctoStack.
“One thing that became clear is that, as the enterprise market is going from experimentation last year to deployments, one, all of them are looking around because they’re nervous about sending data over an API,” Ceze said. “Two: a lot of them have also committed their own compute, so why am I going to buy an API when I already have my own compute? And three, no matter what certifications you get and how big of a name you have, they feel like their AI is precious like their data and they don’t want to send it over. So there’s this really clear need in the enterprise to have the deployment under your control.”
Ceze noted that the team had been building out the architecture to offer both its SaaS and hosted platform for a while now. And while the SaaS platform is optimized for Nvidia hardware, OctoStack can support a far wider range of hardware, including AMD GPUs and AWS’s Inferentia accelerator, which in turn makes the optimization challenge quite a bit harder (while also playing to OctoAI’s strengths).
Deploying OctoStack should be straightforward for most enterprises, as OctoAI delivers the platform with read-to-go containers and their associated Helm charts for deployments. For developers, the API remains the same, no matter whether they are targeting the SaaS product or OctoAI in their private cloud.
The canonical enterprise use case remains using text summarization and RAG to allow users to chat with their internal documents, but some companies are also fine-tuning these models on their internal code bases to run their own code generation models (similar to what GitHub now offers to Copilot Enterprise users).
For many enterprises, being able to do that in a secure environment that is strictly under their control is what now enables them to put these technologies into production for their employees and customers.
“For our performance- and security-sensitive use case, it is imperative that the models which process calls data run in an environment that offers flexibility, scale and security,” said Dali Kaafar, founder and CEO at Apate AI. “OctoStack lets us easily and efficiently run the customized models we need, within environments that we choose, and deliver the scale our customers require.”
OctoML launches OctoAI, a self-optimizing compute service for AI
OctoML makes it easier to put AI/ML models into production
Mars exploration has always been the exclusive purview of national space agencies, but NASA is trying to change that, awarding a dozen research tasks to private companies as a prelude to commercial support for future missions to the Red Planet.
It’s the second time in a month that the agency has shown its desire for commercial support in Mars missions, having more or less scrapped the original Mars Sample Return mission in favor of a to-be-determined alternative, likely by private space companies.
A total of nine companies were selected to perform 12 “concept studies” on how they could provide Mars-related services, from payload delivery to planetary imaging to communications relays. While each award is relatively small — between $200,000 and $300,000 — these studies are an important first step for NASA to better understand the costs, risks, and feasibility of commercial technologies.
The companies selected are Lockheed Martin, Impulse Space, and Firefly Aerospace for small payload delivery and hosting services; United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, and Astrobotic for large payload delivery and hosting services; Albedo, Redwire Space, and Astrobotic for Mars surface-imaging services; and SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, and Blue Origin for next-gen relay series.
Nearly all the selected proposals would adapt existing projects focused on the moon and Earth, NASA said in a statement. The 12-week studies will conclude in August, and there’s no guarantee that they would lead to future requests for proposals or contracts. That said, it’s similarly unlikely that future contracts would appear without a study having previously been done by a company vying for it.
The companies were sourced from a request for proposals put out by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory earlier this year. According to that solicitation, the idea is to develop a new paradigm for Mars exploration, one that delivers “more frequent lower cost missions” via partnerships between government and industry.
The plan is similar to the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which provides large contracts to private companies to deliver payloads to the moon. And like CLPS, which helped bankroll the first successful private lunar lander (among others), these latest awards also show that the agency is increasingly comfortable working with smaller, earlier-stage startups working on unproven tech.
Intuitive Machines makes history by landing the first commercial spacecraft on the moon
Space startups are licking their lips after NASA converts $11B Mars mission into a free-for-all
Website builder Squarespace is being taken private by U.K.-based private equity firm Permira in an all-cash deal that gives the company an enterprise valuation of $6.9 billion.
Founded in 2004 by CEO Anthony Casalena, Squarespace is best known for its no-code platform designed to help SMEs and freelancers build websites, blogs and online stores. It includes customizable templates and a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) interface that users can configure by dragging and dropping different elements.
Shortly after raising $300 million at a hefty $10 billion valuation in 2021, Squarespace filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), reaching a market cap high of $8 billion in mid-2021. In the intervening months, the company’s stock went into freefall, dropping its worth to a low of $2 billion in 2022. This year has seen its stock rebound to its highest point since late 2021, and its market cap has soared past the $5 billion mark off the back of strong earnings.
As part of its offer, Permira will offer Squarespace shareholders $44 per share, representing a 15% premium on its Friday (May 10, 2024) closing price. The deal gives the company an equity valuation of $6.6 billion.
In a huge vote of confidence in Casalena, who steered the company from blog-hosting service while at university to a billion-dollar business, Permira is keeping him on as CEO and board chairman. He will also continue to be “one of the largest” Squarespace shareholders post-acquisition.
Are PEs coming back strong?
There has been a flurry of activity in the private equity space of late: Thoma Bravo took cybersecurity company Darktrace private in a $5 billion deal, shortly after a similar deal to take critical event management software company Everbridge private for $1.8 billion.
Vista Equity also last month announced plans to acquire revenue optimization platform Model N for $1.25 billion, while EQT subsidiary EQT Private Capital Asia snapped up API and identity management software company WSO2 for more than $600 million.
Permira, for its part, has been involved in some big acquisitions these past few years. In 2022, it struck a take-private deal that saw it team up with Hellman & Friedman to acquire Zendesk for $10.2 billion, and a year before that, it shelled out $5.8 billion for email security firm Mimecast.
Less than two weeks ago, Permira acquired a majority stake in BioCatch, a Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity firm that uses AI and machine learning to help customers such as banks track users’ online behavior to establish whether a person is real or a potential fraudster.
Squarespace, as a consumer-grade website builder, is fairly far removed from Permira’s previous acquisitions. But it is clearly an alluring proposition for a private equity firm looking for a solid business that has largely underperformed. Squarespace passed $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time last year, and it has made additional investments in generative AI (GenAI) to help businesses produce web content and email campaigns. Its trajectory may be one of the reasons Permira came calling.
“The Squarespace ecosystem provides SMBs with a broad offering — from demand generation to powerful payment solutions, all seamlessly interwoven with intuitive GenAI,” Permira partner Andrew Young said in a statement. “We share Anthony and the team’s vision to further invest in these tools to help customers grow.”
