Robert Smith's Vista Equity Is Considering Selling One Of His Portfolio Companies, Tibco, For $7 Billion. Photo: Robert F. Smith at Summit LA19 in Downtown Los Angeles, Nov. 11, 2019. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP)
Private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, owned by Black billionaire Robert Smith, is considering selling its cloud computing data analytics company, Tibco Software, for as much as $7 billion, according to reports.
Vista has more than $77 billion in assets under management and is focused on investments in software, data and tech-enabled service companies. It acquired Tibco in the fourth quarter of 2014 for $4.3 billion.
Tibco’s software was generating more than $1 billion in annualized revenue by the time it agreed to be acquired by Vista in 2014.
The infrastructure and business intelligence software firm Tibco has since acquired several companies to build out its platform and product offering, including:
Vista Equity has not indicated whether it has a financial advisor or prospective buyer for Tibco.
Unnamed sources told CNBC that the company could fetch more than $7.5 billion in a sale. In 2018, Vista considered a sale of Tibco but it never materialized.
A sale price of $7.5 billion or more would represent a significant return on investment for Vista.
It is not yet certain that Vista will go ahead with the sale this time around — there have been other attempts — but it is already planning to hold talks with several banks to act as their financial advisor, according to sources.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Vista Equity Partners settled a closely watched lawsuit in 2016 brought by Tibco investors. The firms paid about $30 million to former investors in Tibco Software Inc., after the sale to Vista was marred by a share-count error that lowered the price and deprived shareholders of $100 million.
Tibco launched in 1997 as a provider of software for enabling financial applications to share market data with each other.
The company went public two years later, made it through the dot-com bubble and established itself as one of the leading players in the application integration market.
