F5, the applications networking company today announced the acquisition of Volterra, a multi-cloud management startup for $ 500 million. This comes down to $ 440 million in cash and $ 60 million in deferred and uninvested incentive compensation.
Volterra emerged in 2019 with a $ 50 million investment from multiple sources including Khosla Ventures and Mayfield along with strategic investors like M12 (Microsoft's venture arm) and Samsung Ventures. As the company described to me at the time of financing:
Volterra has innovated a coherent cloud-native environment that can be deployed across multiple public clouds and edge sites - a distributed cloud platform. Within this SaaS-based offering, Volterra integrates a wide range of services that have normally been divided into many flagship products and network or cloud providers.
The solution is designed to provide a single way to view security, operations and management components.
F5 President and CEO François Locoh-Donou sees Volterra's edge solution integrate across its product line. "With Volterra, we enhance our vision of adaptive applications with an Edge 2.0 platform that solves the complex multi-cloud reality that customers face. Our platform will create a SaaS solution that will address our customers' greatest pain points," he said. in a note.
Volterra founder and CEO Ankur Singla, writing in a blog post on the company announcing the deal, says the need for this solution only increased during 2020, when companies were rapidly transitioning to the cloud due to the pandemic. . "When we launched Volterra, multi-cloud and edge were still buzzwords and venture capital financing was still looking for concrete use cases. Fast forward three years and COVID-19 radically changed the landscape: it accelerated the digitization of physical experiences and moved most of our daily activities online. This is causing huge spikes in global internet traffic, while creating new attack vectors that impact the security and availability of our growing set of daily apps, "he wrote.
He sees Volterra's capabilities that fit well with the F5 product family to help solve these problems. While F5 had a quiet 2020 on the M&A front, today's purchase adds to a couple of major acquisitions in 2019 including Shape Security for $ 1 billion and NGINX for $ 670 million.
The deal has been approved by the boards of both companies and is expected to close by the end of March subject to approval by the authorities.
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