Category: VC

After dropping into pothole, Segway gets sold

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

As a rule, we love novelty. And we love it even more when there’s a ridiculous amount of hype – and money – directed toward that novelty, which somehow gets portrayed as something other than a novelty. So imagine our delight when we saw recently that Segway had been sold in what smacks of a scrap sale. The scooter maker, which raked in some $176m in venture backing, announced in mid-January that a UK-based holding company had picked up the firm. No terms were revealed.

Schadenfreude aside, we have to marvel at the craziness that consumed millions of dollars and probably even more engineering hours to solve a problem that never existed. A two-wheeled mode of transportation? Well, it’s pretty hard to top the bicycle, which is arguably the most efficient transportation machine ever created in terms of energy required for motion. That’s certainly not lost on the market. Each year, some 18 million bikes are sold in the US alone, while the Segway counts the total units shipped since its rollout in 2002 at less than 50,000.

No recession for mobile advertising M&A

-Contact Thomas Rasmussen

Following Google’s purchase of AdMob in November, we predicted a resurgence in mobile advertising M&A. That’s just what has happened and, we believe, the consolidation is far from having run its course. Apple, which we understand was also vying for AdMob, acquired Quattro Wireless for an estimated $275m at the beginning of the year. At approximately $15m in estimated net revenue, the deal was about as pricey as Google’s shopping trip for its own mobile advertising startup. And just last week, Norwegian company Opera Software stepped into the market as well, acquiring AdMarvel for $8m plus a $15m earnout. We understand that San Mateo, California-based AdMarvel, which is running at an estimated $3m in annual net sales, had been looking to raise money when potential investor Opera suggested an outright acquisition instead.

These transactions underscore the fact that mobile advertising will play a decisive role in shaping the mobile communications business in the coming years. For instance, vendors can now use advertising to offset the costs of providing services (most notably, turn-by-turn directions) that were formerly covered by subscription fees. Just last week, Nokia matched Google’s move from last year by offering free turn-by-turn directions on all of its smartphones. Navigation is only the beginning for ad-based services as mobile devices get more powerful and smarter through localization and personal preferences.

While traditional startups such as Amobee will continue to see interest from players wanting a presence in the space, we believe the next company that could enjoy a high-value exit like AdMob or Quattro will come from the ranks that offer unique location-based mobile advertising such as 1020 Placecast. The San Francisco-based firm, which has raised an estimated $9m in two rounds, is a strategic partner of Nokia’s NavTeq. As such, we would not be surprised to see Nokia follow the lead of its neighbor Opera by reaching across the Atlantic to secure 1020 Placecast for itself.

Informatica: an MDM deal of its own?

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

With one rumored pairing in the master data management (MDM) market still buzzing, word of another deal is beginning to circulate as well. Several sources have indicated that Informatica may have picked up Siperian and could announce the transaction as soon as Thursday, when it reports fourth-quarter results. (On that note, Wall Street analysts project that Informatica will report earnings of roughly $0.28 per share on sales of $139m, which would represent growth of 12% over the previous fourth quarter.) We would note that Siperian has relatively close ties to Informatica, and continues its OEM relationships with two companies the data integration giant previously acquired (Identity Systems and AddressDoctor).

The Informatica-Siperian chatter comes as IBM is thought to be close to announcing the purchase of fellow MDM vendor Initiate Systems. (Once an IPO hopeful, Initiate instead is rumored to be heading to Big Blue, with a deal expected to be announced in the next week or so.) According to our knowledge, Siperian is slightly less than half the size of Initiate, which we estimate finished last year with around $90m in revenue. We understand that Siperian, which now counts more than 50 enterprise customers, recently crossed into profitability.

While we couldn’t learn the exact price Informatica is paying for Siperian, it is likely to be a significant transaction for a company that typically inks deals totaling around $50m. (In the previous seven buys Informatica made since 2002, it paid between $28-85m.) In fact, one source indicated that the purchase of Siperian could be in the neighborhood of twice the size of its previous largest acquisition, its April 2008 pickup of Identity Systems. Informatica closed three deals last year.

Is IBM about to ‘initiate’ a major MDM purchase?

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Although we recently noted that SAP may be considering a major master data management (MDM) move, we understand that the next buyer in the market may actually be IBM. We’ve heard from several sources that Big Blue is close to announcing an acquisition of Initiate Systems. If the deal does indeed happen, Initiate would substantially boost IBM’s offering for the healthcare industry. Despite being competitors, Initiate and IBM Global Services have been longtime partners for healthcare projects. The transaction could happen as soon as this week, we’re told. And we gather that it’ll come at a rather rich valuation for Initiate.

One of the largest stand-alone MDM vendors, Initiate filed to go public back in November 2007, but withdrew its IPO paperwork the following summer. (Goldman Sachs was lead underwriter of the planned offering.) Shortly after it pulled its prospectus, it announced a $26m funding round that included strategic investments from both EMC and Informatica. However, we hear that the biggest competition for IBM’s rumored bid for Initiate may have come from the public market.

Given the very real prospect that Initiate could reheat its plans to go public, IBM would effectively have to top the valuation that Initiate could receive in an IPO and afterward. We understand that the company was running around breakeven and likely did just shy of $90m in 2009. (That would imply mid-teens growth from the $76m in revenue that Initiate recorded in 2008.) With that dynamic at play, Initiate may well garner 4.5-5x sales in the trade sale to IBM, according to sources.

Server maker Verari resurfaces under original founder

Brenon Daly

Contact: John Abbott

We noted last month that Verari Systems had run into trouble, and to avoid bankruptcy was planning to auction off its assets under an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors agreement. The auction, run by the Credit Management Association, duly took place earlier this month. The successful bidder was none other than an investment group led by original founder Dave Driggers, who acquired ‘substantially’ all of Verari’s corporate and intellectual property assets. The company restarts under the modified name Verari Technologies, with less than one-third of the original headcount of 235, according to our understanding.

There are very few details of the transaction, and not many indications of how the new Verari will be different from – and avoid the same fate as – the old Verari. The fact remains that it’s very hard for a small company to compete in the hardware business against giants like IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. The focus this time will be on datacenter design and optimization services, modular container-based datacenters, blade-based storage and high-performance computing, the vendor said in a statement. The new company now owns all of Verari’s inventory, equipment and technologies, and will immediately start supporting the existing installed base of Verari customers.

High-profile signup David Wright, previously at EMC, took over as CEO in 2006, while Driggers stayed on as CTO. The hints are that Verari will no longer try to compete in the general-purpose server and storage markets but will instead focus on niche segments, particularly those where customers require a degree of customization and consultancy, and work more closely with other industry partners. Those partners could include Cisco, which had been working with Verari on containerized datacenters before the crash. The new Verari will also work on licensing and promoting its patented intellectual property in areas such as system packaging (including blade chassis and containers) and vertical cooling.

Deals on the rebound

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

More than 100 people dialed into our webinar earlier today, joining us in a discussion of whether the tech M&A rebound is real. And while not everyone agreed that deals will flow smoothly – and voluminously – in 2010, there was a shared sense that the M&A recession of 2009 has mostly lifted. Still, a rebound is one thing, while recovery is something else entirely.

We have definitely seen the pace of dealmaking pick up so far in 2010. We noted earlier that we tallied 60% more deals in the first workweek of this year than during the same period last year, and both tech investment bankers and corporate development executives have forecast a busier year for M&A in 2010. If you’d like to get a copy of our slides from this morning’s webinar, send us an email.

Companies buying early and often in 2010

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Maybe it was just working through the backlog of deals from the holiday break, but M&A has started strongly in 2010. We previously noted that a number of big tech buyers have already announced deals this year. (The list of acquirers in the first workweek of January includes EMC, Oracle, Cisco Systems and Apple, among others.) Overall, we tallied 85 transactions in the first week back at our desks, a stunning 60% increase over the first workweek of 2009.

Granted, making projections from a single week is a bit dubious because of the small sample size. Yet while it may not be unerringly precise, it will likely prove directionally accurate. Consider how M&A played out in 2009. In the first week of January, we counted just 53 transactions, giving a projected total for the year of 2,756 deals. That turned out not to be too far off the actual total for 2009 of 3,005 transactions.

If we make the same calculation based on the 85 deals that we counted in the first workweek of this year, we get a projected total of 4,420. That will likely prove too high for the year since it would substantially eclipse the record activity we saw in the boom year of 2006, when there were a lot more buyers at the table. Still, the busy start to 2010 does appear to indicate that this year will be more active than last year. If you are interested in our full outlook for M&A in 2010, join us on our webinar tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. PST/1:00 p.m. EST. To register, click here.

Survey says: Companies ready to deal again

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

This year’s fast start to M&A activity by several of the big-name tech buyers (EMC, Cisco Systems, Apple and Oracle, among others) shouldn’t surprise us at all. After all, when we surveyed corporate development executives last month, two-thirds of them said they expected their firms to pick up the pace of dealmaking in 2010. That’s a far more bullish outlook than their projections last year, when the entire financial services industry and much of the broader economy appeared to be collapsing. At that time, some 23% of respondents said they expected to actually slow their acquisition activity amid all the uncertainty that loomed in the coming year. In our most recent survey, just 5% said they see a slowdown in dealmaking.

We’ll have a full report on the results of our annual 451 Group Tech Corporate Development Outlook Survey in tonight’s Daily 451 and 451 TechDealmaker sendouts. But we would add that the bullishness for M&A in the coming year expressed by our respondents extends far beyond just their projected activity. In both the types of transactions and even the structure of them, companies indicate that they have thrown off much of the conservatism and caution that characterized their outlook in late 2008 and are once again open to risk. And finally, they plan to be busy even though they tell us they’re likely to pay more in the deals they ink in 2010. It’s a dramatic turnaround from the previous year, so look for the full report on the survey tonight.

Projected change in M&A activity in the coming year

Year Increase Stay the same Decrease
2009 68% 27% 5%
2008 44% 33% 23%

Source: The 451 Group Tech Corporate Development Outlook Survey

Silver Creek comes out golden in sale

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Although terms weren’t disclosed in Oracle’s reach for Silver Creek Systems earlier this week, we suspect the startup can claim something that not one of the nine companies that Oracle gobbled up in 2009 can say: it garnered an above-market valuation in the deal. The trade sale also undoubtedly generated a decent return for Silver Creek’s backers, which hasn’t been the case in many recent sales of VC-backed companies.

A pretty lean operation, Silver Creek has raised some $14m since its restart as a data-quality vendor back in 2002 and hasn’t needed to raise money since 2005. We believe Oracle may have ended up paying twice the amount that Silver Creek raised, since we understand there was at least one other bidder. The acquisition essentially formalizes an OEM relationship that the two companies have had since April, as my colleague Krishna Roy noted in her report on the transaction.

Whatever price Silver Creek ended up getting, it’s a notable uptick from last summer, when we were writing about how a startup in a similar market had pulled off an improbable deal that – if everything falls into place and full earnouts are earned – might just make its backers whole again. (See our earlier item on Exeros’ gamble and ultimate sale to IBM.) Also keep in mind that Big Blue only picked up some of the assets of the data discovery startup, not the whole company and its employees, as is the case with Oracle’s reach for Silver Creek. All in all, Oracle’s purchase of Silver Creek is yet another sign that the tech M&A market continues to rebound, even if it hasn’t yet fully recovered.

The market and Meru

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Having watched at least three of its rivals get acquired in recent years, Meru Networks is now aiming for the other exit: a public offering. The WLAN equipment maker filed its IPO paperwork on Friday for an $86m offering to be led by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, with co-managers Robert W. Baird & Co, Cowen & Co, JMP Securities and ThinkEquity. Meru plans to trade on the NYSE under the ticker MERU. (Incidentally, the company was one we put on our list of IPO candidates for 2010 in our recently published 2010 M&A Outlook – Security and networks.)

If Meru does manage to make it onto the public market, it will reverse the flow of deals in the sector. In recent years, a large publicly traded rival (Symbol Technologies) and two other competing startups (Colubris Networks and Trapeze Networks) have all been acquired. Those trade sales have valued the WLAN equipment vendors at a range of 2.1-3x trailing 12-month (TTM) sales.

We noted a year and a half ago that all of the transactions probably meant that Meru would have trouble finding a buyer, except among public market investors. Not that Meru hasn’t kicked around a possible sale in the past. Rumors have tied it to both Juniper Networks and Foundry. The Foundry relationship seems to have died off since Foundry sold to Brocade Communications. According to Meru’s S-1, Foundry/Brocade accounted for a full 35% of its revenue in 2007, but that level has fallen to less than 10% now.

With Meru aiming to hit the market in 2010, we suspect that it will be hoping to have a stronger offering than publicly traded rival Aruba Networks, which initially priced its shares in its March 2007 offering at $11 each. Although Aruba traded above the offer price for almost a year, it broke issue in February 2008 and has not traded above the initial price since then. That said, the stock is nearing that level, changing hands at about $10.65 in midday trading Tuesday. It has more than quadrupled in 2009. The dramatic rebound in Aruba shares has pushed the firm’s valuation to 4.6x TTM sales. Applying that same multiple to Meru’s $67m TTM sales gives the company a valuation of about $310m.