MariaDB Corp., which sells a commercial version of the open-source MariaDB database management system, will become a publicly traded company through a merger with Angel Pond Holdings Corp. in a transaction known as a special purpose procurement company or SPAC.
SPAC is essentially a public shell company formed for the purpose of acquiring another company and making it public. The business has no operations but sells shares to investors who want to buy into the acquired company. SPACs have risen to prominence as a faster and less risky alternative to conventional initial public offerings, rising nearly $ 162 billion in 2021 compared to just $ 10 billion in 2017.
The transaction will value MariaDB at $ 672 million, or just over 14 times projected fiscal 2022 revenues of $ 47.4 million. A $ 104 million private placement of Series D preferred shares in the company was closed in conjunction with the announcement, with $ 43 million coming from current investors and $ 27 million from an Angel Pond sponsor affiliate. In total, the transaction is expected to provide up to $ 370 million of net cash revenues.
Angel Pond is co-founder of Theodore T. Wang, a former partner at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and Shihuang Xie, a co-founder of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. The joint company will be called MariaDB plc and will be headed by MariaDB CEO Michael Howard. Angel Pond will dissolve after the fusion is complete.
MariaDB joins a select group of companies that have reached public markets by selling open-source software. The DBMS was developed to be a drop-in replacement for the popular MySQL relational DBMS following the acquisition of Oracle Corp. of that software in 2010. Like many open source -based commercial companies, the company struggled in its early days to find a path to profitability that kept its roots open while providing value that customers would pay for. . MariaDB angered some customers in 2017 when it made its licensing terms stricter.
Its breakout came with the release of the cloud-native version of SkySQL in 2020 amid the rapid growth of the database-as-a-service market, which is expected to grow by more than 21% annually over the next five years. SkySQL captures a quarter of the company’s revenues in less than a year. “This is going to be the way the company is going with the IPO,” Howard told SiliconANGLE, prophetically, in July.
MariaDB has raised more than $ 123 million from a long list of investors that includes Intel Capital Corp., ServiceNow Inc., Open Ocean Capital Ltd., Alibaba Group and OnCorp.
Photo: MariaDB on Facebook
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