Why a $5.3 billion leveraged buyout is VERY good for hot startup MuleSoft
Informatica follows a bunch of other go-private deals in the enterprise tech world including Dell, BMC and Informatica's rival Tibco, who went private last year for $4.3 billion.
With Tibco and Informatica exiting the public markets, there's one company sitting pretty to benefit: a hot startup called MuleSoft.
All three of these companies offer a service that allows enterprise IT people and software developers to connect different applications together so they can share data and work together.
That "data integration" market is huge and growing. Enterprises spent over $300 billion a year on it, market researchers say, and it's growing by about 12% annually (CAGR).
MuleSoft's claim to fame is that it solves the hard problem of integrating cloud applications together, as well as with a company's existing apps. That means, for instance, the customer data kept in in Salesforce can be used by the Workday HR app and the Oracle database kept in the data center.
MuleSoft was founded in 2006 by Ross Mason, who spent three years building his company while living on the island of Malta and commuting 6,000 miles every other week to San Francisco. He finally gave in and moved the company to San Francisco after he got caught in a scary incident where his plane got caught in the ash after the Iceland volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted.
And MuleSoft has been going gangbusters ever since.
It employs more than 500 people in 10 offices worldwide, and serves thousands of enterprise customers including global banks, US wireless carriers, and global insurance companies.
It's clearly marching toward an IPO, which may come sooner rather than later thanks to Informatica and Tibco's go-private deals.
NEA partner Aaron Jacobson pointed this out in a tweet. (Jacobson did not lead NEA's investment in MuleSoft. That would be Scott Sandell.)