TA Associates and Vista Equity Partners have agreed to make a joint investment in Aptean, a maker of enterprise software for manufacturers and distributors, with The Wall Street Journal reporting the deal is valued at just under $1 billion. Aptean has been a portfolio company of Vista since 2012, when the software investor backed the company’s formation via the merger of Consona and CDC Software.
With the latest transaction, the firm seems to be shifting its stake in Aptean from one vehicle to another and offering liquidity to a set of older LPs. The new backing comes from its $3 billion Vista Foundation Fund III, per the WSJ, and the deal will reportedly represent an exit for Vista’s fourth flagship fund, which it used to invest in Aptean seven years ago.
Aptean is a Georgia company that makes software focused on enterprise resource planning, supply chains and compliance for some 2,500 clients. The business spent much of 2018 slimming down its operations, striking a deal to merge its public sector and healthcare assets with Superion and TriTech in July and selling its vertical business applications unit to ESW Capital in October.
Vista first began pursuing a sale of Aptean a few years ago, with Reuters reporting in 2016 that the firm hired Morgan Stanley to explore a deal at a possible valuation of $1 billion.
TA Associates and Vista are two of the world’s most prolific IT investors, and the past few years have been a very good time to be pursuing big-money deals in the industry. Across the US and Europe, investors completed 33 buyouts in the IT space worth $1 billion or more in both 2017 and 2018, per the PitchBook Platform. Before that, the annual high this decade for such deals was just 22.
And several other 10-figure IT deals have already been announced in February, most notably Hellman & Friedman‘s agreement to purchase Ultimate Software for $11 billion. H&F also lined up another mega-deal this month, teaming with Blackstone on a pact to buy Scout24 for €5.7 billion (about $6.4 billion), while Thoma Bravo agreed to buy Ellie Mae for $3.7 billion.
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