The coronavirus pandemic has increased interest from investors in companies whose offerings make it easier to reach employees and students remotely. One such company is Utah-based Pluralsight, which was founded in 2004. The company offers a library of more than 7,500 online courses to businesses and individuals including IT professionals such as developers, operations professionals, and data and security analysts. The company currently has 1,700 employees and more than 17,000 customers. Pluralsight says that its two flagship products are used by 70% of Fortune 500 companies.
While analysts have been expecting Pluralsight’s billing revenue growth to slow as companies tighten training budgets due to the pandemic, this didn’t stop Vista Equity Partners who have agreed to acquire the company for $3.5 billion. That’s $20.26 a share for the company, a 25% premium to the average closing price over the past 30 days.
Before going public in May 2018, Pluralsight had raised nearly $200 million in venture capital across three investment rounds, the last of which valued it at more than $1 billion. The company also offers Flow, a data analytics tool for engineers. Flow provides insight into how long engineering teams take refactoring legacy code, and also provides analysis into project bottlenecks, commit risk, code churn, and project risk assessments.
“We have seen firsthand that the demand for skilled software engineers continues to outstrip supply, and we expect this trend to persist as we move into a hybrid online-offline world across all industries and interactions, with business leaders recognizing that technological innovation is critical to business success,” said Monti Saroya, Co-Head of the Vista Flagship Fund and Senior Managing Director at Vista.
Once the transaction is completed, Pluralsight will become a privately held company and its shares will no longer be listed on any public market. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2021.
