Enterprise Software Firm Pluralsight Acquired By Vista Equity Partners For $3.5 Billion

In an all cash deal worth $3.5 Billion, Vista Equity Partners acquire Pluralsight

The deal was announced on Sunday and will result in Vista acquiring all outstanding shares of Pluralsight for $20.26 apiece. This also includes a 25% premium on average closing stock prices for the past 30 days.

Vista has reportedly partnered with co-investors, including Partners Group for the purchase. The global investment company manages over $73 billion in assets with a focus on enterprise software, technology, and data.

Pluralsight is an Utah-based company founded in 2004 and hag grown into an enterprise technology company appointing about 1,700 employees. The company’s main areas of  focus is on workforce training and development. It also dabbles in data-driven course creation and deployment in subjects such as cloud technology, data science, security, and artificial intelligence (AI) through the Pluralsight Skills platform.

Pluralsight’s secondary service, Flow, has been designed especially for engineers and workforce management. It 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.

The acquisition statement underlined an “unsolicited acquisition interest” in a potential Pluralsight sale, but an independent committee deliberated that using Vista was in the “best interests of Pluralsight and its shareholders.”

Pluralsight says that over 70 percent of the users of its two flagship products are Fortune 500 companies.

“We are relentlessly focused on helping enterprises improve and optimize their technology workforce and providing the most effective path to skills transformation for their technology teams,” said Pluralsight CEO, Aaron Skonnard. “The global Vista ecosystem of leading enterprise software companies provides significant resources and institutional knowledge that will open doors and help fuel our growth. We’re thrilled that we will be able to leverage Vista’s expertise to further strengthen our market-leading position.”

The acquisition was accepted by the Pluralsight Board of Directors and will go through in the first half of 2021.