As the hectic M&A cycle had an oversight throughout 2020 continued this weekend when Vista announced it was acquiring Pluralsight for $3.5 billion.
When the company stock closed on Friday at $18.50 per share on a market cap of over $2.7 billion that comes out to $20.26 per share.
Vista gets an online training company as an acquired Pluralsight that helps educate IT specialists including developers, operations, data, and security with a suite of online courses. As the global pandemic has taken hold, it has breathed new life into education technology, but even before that, there was a market for upskilling IT Pros online.
This trend definitely didn’t skip Monti Saroya at all, co-chair of the Vista Flagship Fund and senior managing director at Vista. “We have seen that the demand for skilled software engineers continues to outstrip supply, and we assume this trend to persist as we move into a hybrid online-offline world across all industries and interactions, as business leaders recognizing that technological innovation is critical to business success,” he said in a statement.
As is typical for acquired companies, CEO Aaron Skonnard of Pluralsight sees this as a way to make more strength to grow the company more quickly. “The global Vista ecosystem provides fertile resources and professional tech knowledge that will unlock opportunity and help fuel our growth. We’re thrilled and warm excited that we can leverage Vista’s expertise to further strengthen our market-leading position,” Skonnard said in a statement.
Skonnard described In a 2017 interview with TechCrunch’s Sarah Buhr, that the company as an enterprise SaaS learning platform. It goes beyond simply offering the courses by having professionals in a given category such as a developer or IT operations the ability to measure their skills and abilities against other pros in that category. As he experienced this assessment capability as a significant differentiator.
“As our hybrid platform is mainly focused on minimizing the technology skills gap throughout the world,” Skonnard told Buhr.
Pluralsight was founded in 2004, before going public in 2018 raised over $190 million. The company has more than 1700 employees and over 17,000 customers.
This acquisition should be as standard regulatory oversight but is expected to close in the first half of next year. if that happens, the company will go private again.
