M&A roundup - week ending 6/18/16

Microsoft bought LinkedIn; Pinterest acquired Fleksy; Bed Bath and Beyond purchased One Kings Lane

Microsoft acquired LinkedIn. The purchase price was for $196 per share, or 45 percent above LinkedIn's price before the deal was announced, and valuing the social network at $26.2 billion.

As per the deal, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner will remain in his current position, reporting to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. LinkedIn will remain a separate business under Microsoft.

Microsoft will use LinkedIn's data to enhance Microsoft's Office 365 commercial and Dynamics businesses.

The transaction has been unanimously approved by the Boards of Directors of both companies, and is expected to close at some point in the next six months, though the deal is still subject to approval by LinkedIn’s shareholders, the satisfaction of certain regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

Microsoft also acquired Wand Labs, a messaging app developer. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Going forward, Wand Labs will be shutting down, and Microsoft will be using the technology, and the team, to move forward with its strategy for Conversation as a Platform, which Satya Nadella introduced at the Build 2016 conference in March of this year.

Founded in 2013, Wand Labs had raised $2.67 million in venture funding from investors that included Keval Desai, partner at InterWest Partners; Ben Ling, investment partner at Khosla Ventures; and Arif Janmohamed, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Bed Bath and Beyond acquired One Kings Lane, a flash-sales site focuses on home furnishings. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed, but the price "not material to Bed Bath & Beyond."

One Kings Lane will remain an independent brand under the Bed Bath & Beyond umbrella and will continue to operate their own retail strategy. The company will provide additional support and exposure to promote and grow their brand. 

Bed Bath and Beyond will retain the New York office and staff, though it will close One King's Lane's San Francisco in 2017.

One Kings Lane had raised  over $220 million in total funding, valuing the company at $900 million.

Pinterest acquired the team behind smart keyboard app Fleksy. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

About half of of the Flesky team, four people. will be coming to work at Pinterest, including Kosta Eleftheriou, the company's founder and CEO. The team will be joining the product engineering team at Pinterest.

While Pinterest is not acquiring the app's technology, Fleksy will continue to run for the foreseeable future. The company will soon open-source some of the app’s accessibility components, which are helpful to the blind and visually impaired community.

Founded in 2011, Fleksy had raised $5.9 million in venture funding from Digital Garage, Fortify Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Middleland Capital, among others. 

Samsung acquired cloud infrastructure and big data analytics company Joyent. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Going forward, Joyent will continue to operate as a standalone company under Samsung. Meanwhile the company's team of technologists, including its CEO, Scott Hammond, its CTO, Bryan Cantrill, and its VP of Product, Bill Fine, will join Samsung to work on company-wide cloud initiatives.

Founded in 2004, Joyent had raised $126 million in venture funding. Investors in the company included El Dorado Ventures, EPIC Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Intel Capital, LG Innovation Ventures, Orascom TMT Investments, and Rally Ventures.

Cambridge Consultants, a product development firm, acquired Synapse, a product development firm specializing in consumer technology. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

This acquisition, combined with Cambridge Consultants, will grow the Innovative Product Development activity revenues of Altran by 50 percent by the end of 2016.

Ross Collins, founder of Synapse, will join the board of Cambridge Consultants as a director and Redwood Stephens, president of Synapse, becomes the president of Cambridge Consultants’ US West operations.  

Founded in 1995, Synapse had raised $3 million in venture funding.

 This acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to be completed in Q3 2016.

Lawgix, a provider of litigation support and court appearance management technology, acquired Fixed, an app to fight parking tickets. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

The acquisition was the technology, rather than the company's talent. 

Fixed had raised $1.8 million in seed funding, including from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank, Slow Ventures, Structure VC, Paul Buchheit, Nas, and others.

Impact Radius, a digital marketing and affiliate solution, acquired Forensiq, an advertising fraud prevention company. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Forensiq eliminates fraud from the entire marketing funnel, from bid request to acquisition, empowering its users to ensure that their budgets are being spent on viewable impressions being served to real humans. Their fraud detection technology analyzes probabilistic and deterministic signals from over 4 trillion monthly events across desktop and mobile devices using a multi-layered approach to identifying and preventing fraud.

The acquisition comes in the wake of Impact Radius’ recently announced $30 million fundraising round led by Silversmith Capital Partners earlier this month.

OneLogin, a cloud identity management company, acquired Portadi, a cloud-based password management tool. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

The acquisition will enable OneLogin customers to increase employee productivity by automatically populating their OneLogin portal with apps as they manually sign into them.

Founded in 2014, Portadi had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Microsoft Accelerator.

TransUnion, an information solutions provider, acquired Auditz, a healthcare services organization. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

TransUnion will broaden its product line to offer Auditz’ Transfer diagnosis related groups solution. 

Auditz customers will gain access to TransUnion solutions designed to empower healthcare providers to make more informed decisions at the point of service, including ClearIQ patient access products.

Cavium, a provider of semiconductor products, acquired QLogic, a provider of data center networking and storage networking infrastructure solutions. Cavium bought all outstanding QLogic common stock for approximately $15.50 per share, or $1.36 billion.

The transaction will be funded with a combination of $220 million balance sheet cash, $750 million of committed financing, which includes $650 millionof term loan and $100 million of short-term bridge debt, and $400 million in new Cavium equity.

The deal has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies.

Incedo, a technology services firm specializing in data management, product engineering and emerging technologies, acquired SysLogic Technical Services, a telecom consulting and software development firm. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

SysLogic will continue to operate under its own brand and will now be an Incedo company.

The acquisition a part of Incedo’s global strategy to offer broad-based communication engineering solutions and services to the telecom service provider markets in addition to the OEM and semiconductor industry that Incedo has been serving.

The acquisition will add several consultants and developers across US to Incedo’s 1500 person development and delivery team. It will enable Incedo to expand its business presence to some of the largest Tier 1 service providers in the US market.

Pick My Solar, an online solar purchasing platform, acquired Solar Merchant, an online solar marketplace. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

The acquisition extends Pick My Solar's solution to commercial real estate owners and tenants, allowing business owners and real estate investors across the country to extend their investments into solar energy in an efficient, streamlined process and ensure maximum return on investment.

Founded in 2015, Solar Merchant won the US Department of Energy Catalyst Energy Innovation Prize, which provided funding from DoE’s SunShot Initiative.

 VFO, operator of the Freedom Scientific and Optelec brands, acquired Ai Squared, a developer of screen magnification and screen reading software. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Together, the companies offer the world's broadest suite of assistive technology products for the visually-impaired.  Each of the companies has a long history of providing innovative technology solutions that enable blind and low vision individuals to reach their full potential, to gain an education, obtain employment, succeed in professional careers, and live independently throughout their lives.

Founded in 1997, Ai Squared is available in more than 23 languages and sold in 45 countries worldwide. Its family of products include ZoomText, ZoomText Fusion, Window-Eyes, Sitecues, ZoomText Large-Print Keyboard, ZoomText ImageReader, the ZoomReader iOS app and the ZoomContacts iPad app.

Entertainment Studios, an independent producer and distributor of first-run syndicated television programming for broadcast television stations, acquired African-American focused digital news platform TheGrio. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Founded in 2009, TheGrio generates three million unique visitors per month.

Entertainment Studios is the owner of seven 24-hour HD cable television networks, including PETS.TV, COMEDY.TV, RECIPE.TV, CARS.TV, ES.TV, MYDESTINATION.TV, and JUSTICECENTRAL.TV.

AccentHealth, a patient education media company at the point of care, acquired PageScience (formerly Precision Health Media), a provier of programmatic advertising targeting for pharmaceutical marketers. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

With the acquisition, AccentHealth's patient engagement platform can now provide health and wellness marketers multiple, unique touchpoints across the patient journey.

Bill Jennings, CEO of PageScience, will become president of the PageScience division of AccentHealth, and together with the balance of the PageScience team, join AccentHealth's New York City office.

Founded in 2008, PageMatch analyzes and scores more than 100 million pages per week to deliver branded healthcare advertisements on more than 1,100 premium content websites. The company raised $2.1 million in venture funding. 

Brainly, a social learning community for students, acquired peer-to-peer study help platform OpenStudy. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

OpenStudy's users will be invited to join Brainly's existing 60 million monthly users to create a single global community with the joint mission of sharing knowledge between students through digital conversations.

More immediately, both platforms will continue as separately branded entities with their own respective websites and apps, while sharing knowledge and data to improve the learning experience for users of both platforms.

Founded in 2008, OpenStudy had raised $1.27 million in venture funding from Learn Capital.

Communications company CenturyLink acquired ElasticBox, a multi-cloud application management service. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

This acquisition combines the ElasticBox platform with the global network, hosting and delivery capabilities of CenturyLink.

Founded in 2011, ElasticBox enables application orchestration for more than 12 different cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, IBM's SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure and VMware. It recently added support for CenturyLink Cloud and more feature support for Google Compute Engine and OpenStack. ElasticBox also supports Docker and Amazon ECS containers, and recently added Kubernetes as another destination for applications. 

The company raised $13.6 million in venture funding from AngelPad, Intel Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Raymond Tonsing and Sierra Ventures.

Oi media, provider of a proprietary technology enabled platform, acquired AdClever a software company in the OOH media space. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

AdClever is now a 100 percent subsidiary of Oi media.

The acquisition of AdClever has enriched Oi media through a team of dedicated technology professionals with a sound knowledge of the OOH media domain.

Yardi Systems, a software vendor for the real estate industry, acquired Proliphix, a provider of Internet-managed energy control solutions. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

With this acquisition of Yardi continues to strengthen ots Smart Energy Suite, adding the Proliphix Energy Control Solution to its suite of mobile-enabled energy management solutions.

Proliphix customers include many of America’s familiar brand-name retailers, restaurants, and financial and government institutions.

MedData, a MEDNAX company and a national provider of technology-enabled healthcare services, acquired Cardon Outreach, a provider of integrated revenue cycle management services. The purchase consideration for the transaction was $400 million.

After the deal closes, the combined companies will have nearly 2,000 employees. Each entity will retain its brand and all current facilities will remain in place as they are today.

Founded in 1996, Cardon Outreach is currently expected to generate 2016 annualized earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), a non-GAAP measure, of $36 million.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals and is expected to close within the next 30 days.

Symantec, provider of security products and solutions, acquired enterprise security company Blue Coat. The price was approximately $4.65 billion in cash.

The Board of Directors will continue to be led by Symantec’s current Chairman, Dan Schulman. Greg Clark, Chief Executive Officer of Blue Coat, will serve as CEO, and Thomas Seifert, Chief Financial Officer of Symantec, will continue as Chief Financial Officer.

Members of Blue Coat’s management team have not only agreed to join Symantec but also made the decision to rollover a substantial portion of their cash and options into the combined entity.

On a pro-forma, non-GAAP basis, the combined company would have had $4.4 billion in revenues in fiscal year 2016, of which 62% would come from enterprise security. By the end of fiscal 2018, Symantec expects to realize $550 million in run-rate cost savings, of which $400 million will come from Symantec’s previously announced cost efficiency program.

The transaction has been approved by the Boards of Directors of both companies and is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of 2016.

Anju Software, a life sciences software platform, acquired Online Business Applications, a provider of medical communication systems and drug safety compliance software. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

 As part of this transaction, Anju raised funding from Providence Strategic Growth (PSG), the growth equity affiliate of Providence Equity Partners, a global private equity firm with $45 billion in assets under management.

Founded in 1989, OBA's customers include many of the world's largest life sciences companies and clinical research organizations.

Madison Park Group served as financial advisor and Snell and Wilmer served as legal advisor to Anju Software.

VMware, a provider of virtualization and cloud infrastructure, intends to acquire Arkin Net, a provider of software-defined data center security and operations. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

With the acquisition of Arkin, and through the integration of VMware vRealize Suite, cloud management teams will have access to a new generation of planning, troubleshooting and automation platform that provide visibility and control across the entire data center environment. 

 VMware and Arkin are already collaborating to meet the needs of mutual customers such as Columbia Sportswear, California Department of Water Resources (CDWR) and Nebraska Medicine.

Founded in 2013, Arkin raised $22 million in venture funding.

The transaction is expected to close in Q2 2016.

RealPage, a provider of on-demand software and software-enabled services for the vacation rental housing industries, acquired e-procurement software and group purchasing services company eSupply Systems, and those of certain entities related to eSupply Systems. The purchase price was $7.1 million.

The addition of eSupply Systems’ assets rounds out the company’s spend management offering, by adding a group purchasing service to its eProcurement platform, a network of more than 10,000 vendors, a vendor credentialing service, and purchasing advisory service offerings.

RealPage initially will roll out the group purchasing service to its small and medium-sized customer base. 

CheckAlt, a mobile and Check 21 payment and item processing solution, acquired Klik Technologies, a provider of receivables solutions, from MUFG Union Bank. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

The combined company will remain as CheckAlt.  The combined company has a staff of approximately 300 with 17 processing sites nationwide.

CheckAlt and MUFG Union Bank are working closely together on an orderly transition to service close to 500 financial institutions and hundreds of corporate customers for Check 21 solutions, and thousands of merchants through mobile and electronic processing.

Samsung Electronics acquired digital advertising technology company AdGear. No financian terms of the deal were disclosed. 

AdGear will operate as an independent, wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Canada Inc. This acquisition was spearheaded by the Samsung Global Innovation Center and will support the extension of Samsung’s Smart TV services.

Founded in 2010, AdGear is based in Montreal.

(Image source: thevarguy.com)