Meeting and event management software provider cvent will be taken private once again, as part of a $4.6 billion transaction involving two of the biggest players in the private equity sphere.
Today’s announcement continues a recent trend that has seen countless companies withdraw from the public markets, spurred on by opportunistic private equity firms looking to make a quick buck off nervous shareholders.
dotcom survivor
Founded in 1999, Cvent could be described as something of a survivor of the Dotcom era, raising huge amounts of venture capital cash before a big IPO in 2013 which valued the company at around $1.5 billion on its opening day. Three years later, Vista Equity Partners swooped in with a Offer of 1,650 million dollars to privatize the companybefore returning to the public markets via a special purchase acquisition company (SPAC) a little over A year ago.
In the intervening months, Cvent’s market capitalization has generally been on the decline, falling from its initial peak of around $4.7 billion to an average of around $2.5 billion for much of 2022.
Now, Vista Equity Partners has said it will sell all of its remaining shares in Nasdaq-listed Cvent to Blackstone, though a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) will also be a “significant minority investor.” Cvent said it expects the deal to close in mid-2023, after which it will revert to a publicly traded company.
In the first half of 2022, private equity firms spent nearly $300 billion on such deals, up 39% from the corresponding period a year earlier, with signs in recent months suggesting a similar trajectory will continue. Just yesterday, experience management software company Qualtrics accepted a $12.5 billion cash offer from private equity firm Silver Lake and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), while news emerged in December that the Expense management software company Coupa would go private in an $8 billion deal headed by Thoma Bravo.
Indeed, Thoma Bravo closed a new $32 billion buyout fund in December, which was followed up last week. Permira’s new $17.7 billion fund. Meanwhile, Vista Equity Partners is supposedly halfway raising a new fund of $20 billion.
The terms of Cvent’s deal will see its shareholders receive around $8.50 per share, representing a premium of around 52% over the volume-weighted average price (VWAP) in the three-month period leading up to the end of January, when the first reports emerged that Cvent was the subject of a new takeover offer.
