Contact: Brenon Daly
Private equity (PE) firm Blackstone Group has picked up a majority stake in TITUS, marking an unconventional bootstrapped-to-buyout exit for the 12-year-old data classification startup. Terms weren’t revealed. With the acquisition, PE shops have now purchased more cybersecurity vendors in 2017 than any year in history, according to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase (see graphic below).
The transaction comes two years after Microsoft made a similar data security move, reaching for Israel-based startup Secure Islands. (Although the price of that deal wasn’t disclosed, subscribers to the M&A KnowledgeBase can see our proprietary estimate on terms.) However, Secure Islands was a much smaller company than TITUS, both in terms of revenue and technology. Secure Islands focused primarily on extending security for Microsoft technology, specifically Office 365 and SharePoint, while TITUS has a broader technology platform. Also, according to our understanding, profitable TITUS generates more than four times the sales that Secure Islands did at the time it was acquired.
For Blackstone (in this case, through its Tactical Opportunities team), the purchase of TITUS represents a return to the information security (infosec) market, with a platform that lends itself to additional bolt-on acquisitions. (The firm used the buy-and-build strategy with infosec reseller/service provider Optiv before selling it to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts a year ago.) Once TITUS is in the portfolio, which should come before the end of the year, Blackstone could help cover the costs of buying into markets where TITUS currently partners. Specifically, markets such as data-loss prevention and archiving would be logical adjacent sectors for Blackstone-backed TITUS to look to shop in.
