Vista Fairness Companions plans to amass KnowBe4 for $4.6 billion in money, taking the publicly traded safety vendor personal.
KnowBe4 — the standard safety consciousness coaching and simulated phishing platform supplier, with some 52,000 buyer organizations worldwide — is the most recent safety vendor to be acquired by a personal fairness agency. PE agency Thoma Bravo has introduced a sequence of id administration vendor acquisitions in current months: Sailpoint, Ping Identification, and most not too long ago, Forgepoint, a deal that was introduced on Wednesday.
Underneath the Vista deal, KnowBe4’s stockholders will get $24.90 per share in money when the transaction is accomplished in early 2023, a 44% premium over KnowBe4’s closing worth on Sept. 16, previous to the acquisition disclosure.
“As a big investor in KnowBe4, we couldn’t be extra excited to take this subsequent step in our journey collectively,” Rod Aliabadi, managing director at Vista, stated in an announcement. “We’ve lengthy appreciated the work that KnowBe4 does in strengthening the human layer of cybersecurity by means of educating staff on methods to establish social engineering and associated cyber threats.”
Vista has been on a tear in cybersecurity investments, with a $1 billion funding in Securonix, a $215 million funding in Vital Begin, and gross sales of SecureLink to Imprivata and Ping Identification. The PE agency additionally took Citrix personal earlier this yr.
KnowBe4 was based by Stu Sjouwerman, chairman and CEO of KnowBe4, and the corporate’s chief hacking officer, Kevin Mitnick, assisted within the design of the corporate’s coaching.
