Salesforce is in talks to buy MuleSoft, briefly sending shares through the roof
- Shares of MuleSoft were briefly halted on Tuesday after news reports that the company is in advanced talks to sell itself to Salesforce.
- If a deal is finalized it could be announced this week.
- Business Insider did confirm with someone close to the matter that Salesforce was working on a big deal that could be announced as soon as this week, but could not confirm that its target was MuleSoft.
Shares of MuleSoft were briefly halted on Tuesday after Reuters reported that the company is in advanced talks to sell itself to Salesforce.
On hearing the news, investors drove MuleSoft's shares up 20% before trading was stopped.
If a deal is finalized it could be announced this week. Business Insider has confirmed that Salesforce was in the final stages of making a big partnership or acquisition announcement but did not confirm that MuleSoft was the target.
MuleSoft would be a good fit for Salesforce. MuleSoft offers a cloud service called Anypoint that allows developers to connect different apps together, so those apps can work together and share data.
MuleSoft was the brainchild of founder Ross Mason, who began it as a small open-source project in 2003 when he and his wife were living on the island of Malta. He was working as a corporate IT developer, struggling to make applications talk to each other, and he whined about it until his wife told him to stop complaining and do something. His project grew through word of mouth until it grew so big, he moved the company to San Francisco and started taking on venture capital investments, eventually raising $259 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion.
On word of an acquisition, investors drove the share price up from about $33 a share to $42.40, when the stock price was halted. MuleSoft is now valued at about $5 billion but shares are already cooling off to under $40. We'll see if Salesforce will pause its negotiations until the stock cools back down the pre-rumor price, or if the company's investors will be in for a little extra windfall.
Salesforce declined comment and MuleSoft could not be immediately reached (though we'll go out on a limb and predict that MuleSoft will also decline comment until the deal is signed).