By Akash Sriram
(Reuters) -Private equity firm Thoma Bravo is buying Ping Identity for $2.4 billion, deepening a bet on the cybersecurity sector that has been one of the big winners of the pandemic.
The deal announced on Wednesday values each share of Ping Identity at $28.50, a premium of 63% to the last closing price of the company whose authentication and security services are used by businesses from Chevron Corp to HP Inc.
Thoma Bravo has been on a shopping spree for cybersecurity firms in recent years, with its acquisitions including Sophos, Proofpoint and Sailpoint Technologies.
Analysts said the latest purchase – which has an equity value of $2.4 billion, according to a Reuters calculation – could work well with Thoma Bravo’s other acquisitions because of similar areas of focus.
“We could foresee them all being stitched together as an all-in-one identity platform at some point,” D.A. Davidson analyst Rudy Kessinger said, adding the deal was “one of the least surprising acquisitions” he has ever seen.
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Thoma Bravo, whose assets under management total more than $114 billion, has also bought software firms such as Anaplan Inc in the past few years.
Ping Identity’s shares surged over 60% on Wednesday. The company’s biggest shareholder is Vista Equity Partners with a stake of nearly 10%, according to Refinitiv data.
Vista had bought Ping Identity in 2016 and then taken it public three years later in an initial public offering that valued the company at $1.16 billion.
Vista has agreed to vote in favor of the deal, which has an enterprise value of $2.8 billion, Ping Identity said.
(Reporting by Nivedita Balu and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Aditya Soni)